Jul 20, 2009

Burma: EU to Impose New Sanctions


Active ImageThe EU will impose new sanctions on the Burmese junta if Aung San Suu Kyi is not freed after her ongoing trial, says a senior British official.

 

 

Below is an article published by The Financial Times:

The European Union will impose new sanctions on the Burmese government and its supporters if Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Laureate and opposition leader, is not freed at the end of her current trial, a senior British official said.

Mrs Suu Kyi, who has spent 13 of the last 19 years under house arrest, faces up to five years in jail if she is convicted of breaking the terms of her detention by allowing John Yettaw, an American, to stay the night after he swam uninvited across the lake behind her house in Rangoon last May [2009].

Asif Ahmad, the head of the South East Asia and Pacific Group at Britain’s Foreign Office, said that if she is found guilty and sentenced to detention, the European Union would impose a harsher sanctions regime.
“The trigger point is the exhaustion of the legal process, when the final sentence is anything other than her being freed,” he said. “Looser chains are not acceptable.”

Mr Ahmad said that the EU had put together a working group to look at extra measures, although he declined to be drawn on the nature of any future sanctions beyond saying that they would continue the Union’s path of targeted sanctions.

Along with some broad blocks on trade in arms, timber and gems and a prohibition on companies investing in state-owned enterprises, most of the European Union’s sanctions are designed to bar certain senior members of the regime and businessmen close to them from travelling to Europe and freeze any funds they might have in European banks.

A European diplomat close to the negotiations said that the bloc was still far from consensus on how such sanctions might be strengthened.

“If you look at economic sanctions, our leverage is minimal. There is nothing exciting in our back pocket,” said the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The diplomat said that given the lack of agreement in Brussels, any increase in the sanctions was likely to be a largely cosmetic display of disapproval rather than anything that would have a significant impact on what is already one of the world’s most isolated regimes.

The US has imposed much broader sanctions, but said at the beginning of the year that it was reviewing its position in view of how little effect they have had. However, the decision to put Mrs Suu Kyi on trial has dimmed the possibility of any immediate relaxation.