Swe Win

Bangkok, September 6, 2023—Myanmar authorities should release photojournalist Sai Zaw Thaike and stop imprisoning members of the press for doing their jobs, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday. On Wednesday, September 6, a military tribunal in Yangon’s Insein Prison sentenced Sai Zaw Thaike to 20 years in prison with hard labor on various charges,…

Bangkok, August 29, 2019 – The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned a decision by Myanmar’s Mandalay District Court to hear an appeal that could reopen a criminal defamation lawsuit against editor Swe Win.

Hopes for greater press freedom when Myanmar moved to quasi-democratic rule were quickly quashed with the jailing in 2017 of two Reuters reporters. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have their freedom again, but journalists and press freedom activists who met with CPJ’s Senior Southeast Asia Representative Shawn Crispin in Yangon in June said that…

Bangkok, July 31, 2017–Myanmar authorities should drop all charges against Swe Win, the editor of the news website Myanmar Now, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Police at Yangon’s international airport yesterday arrested the journalist on charges of attempting to flee the country before his trial next month on criminal defamation charges, news reports…

When Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her long-persecuted National League for Democracy party won elected office in November 2015, bringing an end to nearly five decades of authoritarian military rule, many local journalists saw the democratic result as a de facto win for press freedom.