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The head of Aung San Suu Kyi’s former Oxford college has backed calls from three former foreign secretaries for her to be freed.
Lady Elish Angiolini, the principal of St Hugh’s College, has written to the government of Myanmar seeking her release.
William Hague, Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw argue the ousted leader was jailed on trumped-up charges by the brutal military dictatorship and deserves the chance to lead her country democratically.
Ms Suu Kyi, who faces 27 years in prison, is believed to have spent long periods in solitary confinement since her arrest by the junta in February 2021.
The 79-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner has become a deeply divisive and controversial figure internationally after refusing to speak out on her country’s extreme violence against its Rohingya Muslim minority.
Her fall from grace is explored in an Independent TV documentary entitled Cancelled: The rise and fall of Aung San Suu Kyi, which takes an unbiased look at her life and the plight of Myanmar.
In the documentary, Lord Hague, who welcomed Ms Suu Kyi to London in 2012, said it was possible to be critical of the country’s former de facto prime minister “but also say we should be campaigning for her release”.
He said: “She is a political prisoner on trumped-up charges, imprisoned by a military regime in what seems very harsh circumstances.
“And we might disagree with things that she has said and done, but she has been the strongest force for democracy in Myanmar in a generation, and she is imprisoned because she was that force for democracy.”
A spokesperson for Ms Angiolini told The Independent that she agreed with Lord Hague’s comments and has also written to the government of Myanmar seeking her release.
Scotland’s first female Lord Advocate, she was also chairwoman of the independent inquiry into the murder of Sarah Everard.
Ms Suu Kyi studied at St Hugh’s as an undergraduate and is an honorary fellow.
She held her 67th birthday party at the college where she studied politics, philosophy and economics in the mid-1960s. But in 2017 the college removed her portrait from public display and placed it in storage, following international criticism over her role in her country’s humanitarian crisis.
Two years later, in 2019, Ms Suu Kyi became a global pariah in the eyes of the international community and human rights organisations after she appeared at the International Court of Justice in the Hague to defend her country’s use of force against the Rohingya.
After being elected in 2015, Ms Suu Kyi has been held in prison since the military seized power in a coup in February 2021, a move that plunged the country into conflict.
The call for her release has been backed by host of other senior British politicians.
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