Suu Kyi For Boycotting Myanmar Elections

(RTTNews) - Myanmar's detained pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, is against registering her party for the military-ruled country's forthcoming elections because of the "unjust" restrictions imposed by the ruling junta, her lawyer said Tuesday.

She was quoted as saying that she would "not even think" of registering her National League for Democracy (NLD) for the elections which the government says will be held this year but she left it to her party members to take the final decision on the boycott.

Her comments came hours after Myanmar's Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit filed by her party, seeking to revoke five new election laws, one of which requires parties to either register themselves for the elections or cease to exist. The election laws have been widely criticized as intended to keep Suu Kyi and her party from contesting the elections.

Suu Kyi's comments also came ahead of a crucial meeting Monday in which NLD senior members will decide whether the party registers for the vote or not.

The NLD won the last elections held in Myanmar in 1990 by a landslide, but was barred by the military from assuming power.

The credibility of the upcoming elections has already been called into question, but it will suffer even more without the participation of the country's principal opposition party. The United Nations has warned the ruling junta that the credibility of this year's elections will be suspect if Suu Kyi and many top members of her party and other ethnic-based parties are not freed and allowed to contest.

Suu Kyi has been under detention for 14 of the last 20 years and is effectively barred from contesting and voting in elections under recent laws enacted by the military-ruled government.

Source :http://www.quote.com/news/story.action?id=RTT003240145000034

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