Myanmar leader commutes all death sentences

Myanmar's leader commuted all death sentences in a blanket order on Friday, one of his first official acts since the 2021 coup leader was installed as the country's civilian president.

The military junta led by Min Aung Hlaing snatched power in Myanmar in a February 2021 putsch and resumed executions after decades of not carrying them out, targeting dissidents opposed to his coup, rights group said.

By the following year, more than 130 people had been sentenced to death, according to the United Nations, however, definitive figures are hard to track in the country's opaque, closed-door court system.

After five years ruling as armed forces chief, Min Aung Hlaing was installed last Friday as president in a transition democracy watchdogs have described as a civilian rebranding of military rule.

The shift has been accompanied by rollbacks of some of the junta's post-coup crackdown measures -- steps the leadership tout as reconciliation, but which critics describe as cosmetic measures to aid the rebranding effort.

A communique on behalf of Min Aung Hlaing said "those serving death sentences shall have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment", without naming specific prisoners.

An amnesty in May 2023 lifted the death sentences of 38 individual prisoners, but was not a blanket measure.

Friday's act was announced as part of a broader amnesty to mark Myanmar's Thingyan new year, one of the country's public holidays when forgiveness orders are regularly announced.

More than 4,300 prisoners were slated for release, according to a statement, alongside 179 foreign nationals, while all sentences under 40 years were slashed by one-sixth.

- Waiting relatives -

Outside the barbed-wire boundary of Yangon's Insein prison, AFP journalists saw detained award-winning filmmaker Shin Daewe released on Friday morning.

She was given a life sentence in 2024 -- later commuted to 15 years -- for "complicity in terrorism", according to Reporters Without Borders, which called her initial term the "harshest" post-coup sentencing of a journalist.

"Being reunited with my family will be the greatest joy. Everyone wants to see their family every single day," said the documentary maker.

"Even though I was fortunate, my unlucky friends were left behind in tears. Even as I return to my family, I am returning with tears in my eyes."

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Other gaggles of families waited in the sweltering heat, hoping their relatives were among those freed.

"My brother has been imprisoned for a political case," said 38-year-old Aung Htet Naing, who was prepared for disappointment.

"We cannot expect much because he wasn't included in previous pardons."

Less than 14 percent of those released in successive rounds of amnesties since the coup were political prisoners, think tank the Institute for Strategy and Policy Myanmar said late last year.

More than 30,000 people have been detained for political reasons since the coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

Myanmar's most famous political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi remains detained incommunicado, serving a 27-year sentence which rights groups have denounced as politically motivated.

Min Aung Hlaing swept aside the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's massively popular government in 2021, making allegations it had taken power by means of massive voter fraud in polls the previous year.

Election monitors said there was no evidence of that and the military -- which has ruled Myanmar for most of its history -- wrestled back power as it grew anxious about its waning influence after her landslide victory.

The coup triggered an ongoing civil war, pitching pro-democracy guerrillas and long-active ethnic minority armies against the military.

A junta-organised election concluded in January, reversing the result of the 2020 poll by delivering a walkover win for pro-military parties.

Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party was dissolved and barred from running, while protest or criticism of the poll was made a prisonable offence and voting did not take place in rebel-held areas.

Lawmakers installed in the election voted overwhelmingly for Min Aung Hlaing to serve as their president, and he was sworn into office to start his five-year term last week.

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