Detained Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was taken briefly to hospital on Monday for an unscheduled heart check-up, a government official has confirmed.
News reports said that no details were given on the condition of the prominent human rights defender and Nobel peace laureate, although some said she was in the hospital for less than half an hour and was able to walk unassisted.
Suu Kyi, 64, has been held under house arrest or in jail for 14 of the past 20 years, and concern for her health has been growing as of late. Currently she is being held under house arrest on her lakeside property, where she is believed to be examined monthly by her doctor.
The Burmese woman has become an international symbol for her country's decades-long struggle against military dictatorship since winning Burma’s 1990 parliamentary elections, but prevented from assuming her position as prime minister by the ruling junta.
n Meanwhile, Chinese authorities have turned down a request for medical parole for jailed activist Hu Jia, who is suffering from a serious liver disease that could lead to cancer, his wife Zeng Jinyan said last Monday.
“The head of the medical institute of the Beijing prison told Hu Jia's mother by phone that Hu Jia's… cirrhosis does not conform to regulations on medical parole,” Zeng explained on her blog.
She added that her husband was hospitalised on 30 March in a Beijing prison medical hospital because of suspected liver cancer.
Hu, 36, was sentenced in April 2008 for three-and-a-half years on a charge of inciting subversion, after being accused of plotting to disturb the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
A campaigner for human rights and Aids victims in China, Hu had been a key source of information for foreign media on human rights and environmental violations, government abuses, judicial injustices and mistreatment of dissidents.
He was awarded the Sakharov Prize, a major human rights award, by the European Union six months after he was jailed in 2008.
Zeng said she wants a written response and is still asking for medical parole. The couple have a 2-year-old daughter.
Human Rights Watch has advocated for Hu, saying that China should grant him immediate medical parole.
“The Chinese government should never have sent Hu Jia to prison in the first place,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “Now it is cruelly punishing him by denying medical parole.”
n The organisation has also spoken out recently against the Indian government, saying all charges should be dropped against a West Bengal human rights defender for organising a ‘people's tribunal’ on torture.
Kirity Roy, secretary of Banglar Manadadhikar Suraksha Mancha, was arrested on 7 April and released on bail. The arrest relates to a public hearing about torture in police custody that he helped organise two years ago.
“The allegations against Roy are absurd, especially in a democracy that claims to celebrate its active civil society,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, senior South Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“Arresting people like Roy who are performing a public service by highlighting human rights violations can only be aimed at stifling the truth.”
