Free Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the immediate release of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two Burmese reporters for the Reuters news agency, who were sentenced to seven years in prison in Yangon on 3 September.

Although convicted on a charge of violating Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act, the real reason for their arrest in December 2017 was their investigation into a massacre of ten Rohingya civilians by soldiers in Inn Dinn, a village in the north of Rakhine state.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are clearly been scapegoated in order to deter other journalists from being too curious.

They were framed by the police. During a preliminary hearing, a police captain admitted that his superiors framed them by luring them to a restaurant, where they were given supposedly classified documents and then arrested as they left. The prosecution case was based solely on this trumped-up evidence.

RSF is appalled by the verdict reached at the end of this farcical trial and calls on the country’s most senior officials, starting with government leader Aung San Suu Kyi, to free these two journalists, whose only crime was to do their job.

Their conviction bodes ill for the future of Myanmar, which has seen little progress in respect for the freedom to inform and which is ranked 137th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2018 World Press Freedom Index.

Help us to obtain their release as a matter of urgency by signing this petition now.

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