Yangon - A Myanmar court on Friday postponed until August 11 its verdict on opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and three others charged with breaking the terms of her house arrest in order to review legal questions related to the case, lawyers said. "The judges said they needed to review the legal problems of the case," said Nyan Win, one of Suu Kyi's lawyers. Friday's hearing at a special court set up in Insein Prison for the case lasted only 10 minutes.
Suu Kyi told foreign diplomats who attended the trial Friday that "the outcome of the trial will depend on the rule of law," Nyan Win said.
The postponement of the verdict came as a surprise to many, who were expecting the court to hand down a guilty verdict against Suu Kyi, 64. She stands accused of breaking the terms of her house detention by allowing US national John William Yettaw to swim to her home-cum-prison on May 3 and stay, albeit uninvited, in her compound until the night of May 5.
Nyan Win speculated that the judges need to review the defence team's main argument that Suu Kyi's house detention was no longer legal after the revocation of the 1974 constitution in mid-2008.
Suu Kyi had been charged with threatening national security under the 1974 charter for campaigning in central Myanmar in May 2003 but a new constitution adopted last year has no such clause on threats to national security.
After being attacked by pro-government thugs she was arrested and detained in her Yangon home for almost six years before Yettaw swam in to her compound, allowing the authorities new legal grounds for imprisoning her.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate has spent a total of 14 of the past 20 years under house detention. If found guilty of breaking the terms of her house detention, which officially ended on May 27, Suu Kyi faces a minimum of three years in jail and a maximum of five.
Suu Kyi's two housekeepers, Khin Khin Win and Win Ma Ma, face similar charges for accommodating Yettaw's surprise visit and Yettaw faces several months in jail for breaching various laws, including a prohibition against swimming in Inya Lake, on which Suu Kyi's family compound sits.
Security was tight around the prison, with roadblocks set up to prevent normal traffic flow. Myanmar's junta has issued a warning against any violent reaction to the outcome of the trial which began on May 18.
According to still unconfirmed reports, authorities arrested several pro-democracy activists Thursday night.
"The government may have been worried about an international outcry over a guilty verdict or afraid it would spark more protests," said Win Min, a lecturer on Myanmar political affairs at Chiang Mai University in Thailand.
Observers in Yangon said the court's judges may have been afraid to issue the verdict before the 21st anniversary of August 8, 1988, the day when Myanmar's pro-democracy protests started in Yangon. They ended in a bloody army crackdown a month later that left 3,000 protestors dead.
It is deemed unlikely that Suu Kyi would be found not guiltyon august 11 because her freedom might galvanize opposition to the government's scheduled general election in 2010 that promises to be neither free nor fair.
Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party won the last Myanmar election in 1990 by a landslide even though she was in jail at the time of the polls.
Analysts said Suu Kyi, deemed the only opposition politician the ruling regime fears and a democracy icon to her people, could seriously threaten the military's so-called political reforms, which it has dubbed a "seven-step roadmap" to democracy.
Given this political reality, even Suu Kyi was not optimistic about the outcome of her trial.
"Daw [Mrs] Aung San Suu Kyi is prepared for the worst," her attorney Nyan Win said Tuesday after the court's final hearing.
