Myo Yan Naung Thein (Burmese: မျိုးရန်နောင်သိန်း; born 31 March 1974) is a Burmese pro-democracy activist,[1] and former chief research officer[2] of the National League for Democracy's Central Committee for Research and Strategy Studies. He is a former political prisoner who spent more than 10 years in prison during his three terms. Myo Yan Naung Thein is the founder and director of the Bayda Institute.[3]
Political career
editMyo Yan Naung Thein started his political career at 21 while studying at the Rangoon Institute of Technology (RIT). In 1996, he led student demonstrations with six other students, demanding justice for police brutalities against students and unfair dismissal of students from the University.
He was sentenced to prison for seven years in 1997. He actively participated in the 2007 Saffron Revolution before being arrested again and imprisoned.
On 3 October 2016, he was arrested under Section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law after posting a status on his Facebook page which criticized Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, then the police force and Myanmar armed forces' Commander in Chief, Minister of Border Affairs, and Minister of Home Affairs, following an attack by ethnic insurgents on several police stations in Rakhine State.[4][5][6]
On 7 April 2017, Kamayut Township court sentenced him to six months in jail.[4][7] He was released from prison early, on 12 April 2017.[8]
On 26 July 2019, he was suspended from his duties as he was accused of violating the rules of the NLD.[9]
On 13 February 2021, in the aftermath of the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état, Myo Yan Naung Thein and six other high profile individuals (Min Ko Naing, Kyaw Min Yu, Mg Mg Aye, Pencilo, Insein Aung Soe, and Lynn Lynn) were charged and issued arrest warrants under section 505 (b) of the penal code by the State Administration Council for inciting unrest against the state and threatening "public tranquility" through their social media posts.[10][11][12][13][14]
On 4 March 2022, the military council announced that his citizenship had been terminated.[15]
References
edit- ^ Staff, J. W. F. (14 November 2016). "Pro-Democracy Activist Arrested in Myanmar Over Facebook Posts". Jimmy Wales Foundation.
- ^ "Myanmar Ruling Party Suspends Chief Research Officer for 'Overstepping Authority'". The Irrawaddy. 19 August 2019.
- ^ "NLD member targeted in controversial Facebook post". Nation Thailand. 16 January 2015.
- ^ a b "NLD official gets six month sentence in latest Telco Law case". Frontier Myanmar. 7 April 2017.
- ^ "Case ruling for U Myo Yan Naung Thein on April 7". The Myanmar Times. 5 April 2017.
- ^ "U Myo Yan Naung Thein won't apply for bail again". The Myanmar Times. 18 January 2017.
- ^ "NLD official's defamation charge an affront to democracy: Nyo Nyo Thin". Frontier Myanmar. 31 March 2017.
- ^ "Number Jailed Under Article 66(d) Rises to Eight Since NLD Govt". The Irrawaddy. 8 April 2017.
- ^ "NLD suspends Myo Yan Naung Thein from his duties". Eleven Media Group. 26 July 2019.
- ^ "ကိုမင်းကိုနိုင်၊ ကိုဂျင်မီ၊ အဆိုတော်လင်းလင်း ၊ အင်းစိန်အောင်စိုး၊ ကိုမျိုးရန်နောင်သိမ်း၊ ပန်ဆယ်လို နှင့် မောင်မောင်အေး တို့အား ရာဇသတ်ကြီး ပုဒ်မ ၅၀၅(ခ)ဖြင့် တရားစွဲထားပြီး ဖမ်းဝရမ်းထုတ်ထားကြောင်း တပ်မတော် ကြေညာ". Eleven Media Group (in Burmese). 13 February 2021.
- ^ "ကိုမင်းကိုနိုင်အပါအဝင် နာမည်ကြီး လူပုဂ္ဂိလ် (၇)ဦးကို ဖမ်းဝရမ်းထုတ် [Issued an arrest warrant of 7 famous people including Min Ko Naing]". The Voice Weekly (in Burmese). 13 February 2021.
- ^ "ကိုမင်းကိုနိုင်အပါအဝင် ခုနစ်ဦးကို စစ်အစိုးရ ဖမ်းဝရမ်းထုတ်". Radio Free Asia (in Burmese). 13 February 2021.
- ^ "ကိုမင်းကိုနိုင်၊ ကိုဂျင်မီ၊ အဆိုတော်လင်းလင်းတို့ အပါအဝင် (၇) ဦးကို ဖမ်းဝရမ်းထုတ်". Duwun (in Burmese). 13 February 2021.
- ^ "Junta issues arrest warrants for Min Ko Naing and other prominent activists". Myanmar NOW. 14 February 2021.
- ^ "နိုင်ငံသားအဖြစ်မှ ရပ်စဲကြောင်း ကြေညာခံရသည့်အပေါ် တုံ့ပြန်ချက်များ". DVB. 2022-03-05. Retrieved 2022-12-30.