Myanmar’s ruling military on Friday sentenced a former British ambassador and her husband to one year in prison for violating immigration rules, a junta spokesman said.
Vicky Bowman, who served as an envoy from 2002 to 2006, was arrested last month for failing to state that she lives at an address other than that shown on her alien registration certificate.
Htein Lin, a Burmese national and well-known artist, was arrested for helping his wife live at an address other than her registered address in the Yangon Commercial Center.
The couple, who have a daughter, could have faced up to five years in prison.
Since last year’s coup, Myanmar’s military has carried out a bloody crackdown on dissent and fighting forces opposed to the takeover. Numerous foreigners were involved in the raid.
Local media said the hearing was held in front of a court in Yangon’s Insein Prison.
A UK Foreign Office spokesman said it would “continue to support Ms Bowman and her family until her case is resolved”.
Relations between Myanmar and its former colonial ruler Britain have deteriorated since the military takeover, with the junta this year criticizing the recent downgrading of Britain’s mission in the country as “unacceptable”.
Before becoming Ambassador, Bowman was Assistant Secretary at the British Embassy from 1990 to 1993.
She is now director of the Myanmar Center for Responsible Business and is fluent in Burmese.
Htein Lin took part in a student uprising against a former junta in 1988 and later spent years underground.
He was arrested and imprisoned in 1998 for allegedly opposing junta rule.
After his release in 2004, then-Ambassador Bowman became aware of a series of paintings he was completing in prison using smuggled materials.
She persuaded him to take her the politically sensitive artwork depicting his life behind bars for his own safety.
He later proposed to her while on holiday in the UK, and the couple married in 2006.
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“The recent reports of the sentencing of the former British ambassador and her Burmese artist husband are extremely worrying,” said Ming Yu Hah, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for campaigns.
The United Nations human rights office in Geneva said it was “deeply shocked that the de facto authorities have tried to punish people who have worked for the country’s development”.
The UK government has sanctioned several military-related companies and individuals following the army’s seizure of power.
Bowman and her husband were arrested the day before new sanctions were announced in London against companies it said helped raise funds for the military in the 2017 crackdown on the predominantly Muslim Rohingya minority.
Australian economist Sean Turnell – who worked as an advisor to civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi – was arrested shortly after the coup and accused of violating the colonial-era law on official secrecy.
Japanese filmmaker Toru Kubota is currently being held in Insein prison after being arrested near an anti-government rally in Yangon last July.
He was the fifth foreign journalist to be arrested in Myanmar, after US citizens Nathan Maung and Danny Fenster, Robert Bociaga of Poland and Yuki Kitazumi of Japan – all of whom were later freed and deported.
According to a local monitoring group, more than 2,200 people have been killed and 15,000 arrested since the military took power.
