Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi Gets 3 Years of Jail, Hard Labour for Election Fraud

Two senior members of Suu Kyi's former government are also facing three-year imprisonment.

Myanmar's ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced to three years in prison with hard labour after she was found guilty of electoral fraud on Friday, 2 September.

(Photo Courtesy: Facebook/Aung San Suu Kyi)

Myanmar's ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced to three years in prison with hard labour after she was found guilty of electoral fraud on Friday, 2 September.

She has already been awarded 17 years of jail time for other offences, taking the total number of years that she has to spend in prison to 20.

Two senior members of Suu Kyi's former government were co-defendants in the case, and are also facing three-year imprisonment.

This ruling puts into question the future of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), as the military government has explicitly threatened to dissolve the party before the new election that would reportedly take place in 2023.

Suu Kyi's party won the general election in 2020 by a landslide, after which the military ousted Suu Kyi's elected government on 1 February 2021, saying that it acted over alleged voter fraud.

The NLD had denied the allegations of voter fraud and said that it won fairly.

Suu Kyi has been detained since a coup in Myanmar in early 2021. She has denied all charges and allegations against her.

She has been on trial for more than a year, facing multiple charges ranging from corruption to leaking official documents. The combined sentence for these charges is more than 190 years.

(With inputs from Reuters, TOI, and Al Jazeera.)