A prominent human rights organization on Thursday called on the government of Myanmar to immediately release Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi, a filmmaker and human rights activist who was sentenced to one year in jail on charges of undermining the military in a series of Facebook posts
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th August, 2019) A prominent human rights organization on Thursday called on the government of Myanmar to immediately release Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi, a filmmaker and human rights activist who was sentenced to one year in jail on charges of undermining the military in a series of Facebook posts.A court in the city of Yangon sentenced the 57-year-old filmmaker to a year in prison earlier in the day.
"Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi is a Prisoner of Conscience, this conviction must be quashed, and he must be released immediately and unconditionally," Amnesty International's Director for East and South East Asia, Nicholas Bequelin, said in a statement.
The rights group urged the Myanmarese authorities to take immediate action to "repeal and amend all oppressive laws used to target peaceful activists and critics and stop politically motivated arrests and prosecutions of human rights defenders."
"Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi is a respected filmmaker who has already spent more than four months in detention for criticizing Myanmar's military on social media. The guilty verdict handed down today is an appalling indictment of the state of freedom of expression in Myanmar, where a Facebook post can lead to time in prison," Bequelin said.
The filmmaker, who has liver cancer and requires medical treatment, was arrested on April 12 after a Myanmar military official accused him of defamation in his Facebook posts criticizing the 2008 Constitution drafted by the country's military and the military's role in politics.
Myanmar's military is blamed for committing atrocities against the Muslim Rohingya minority in the state of Rakhine, where government forces have been clashing with local insurgents since 2016.
In 2018, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar issued a report, accusing the Myanmar leadership of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
In the meantime, Facebook has repeatedly removed hundreds of accounts and pages from its social networks that were allegedly linked to Myanmar's military.
