Two Myanmar journalists were arrested and in December 2017 and jailed for seven years while covering the Rohingya crisis. Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, are now appealing the sentence and calling it a mistake. The duo have already spent a year in prison. Lawyers lodged an appeal on Monday to free the journalists. They were arrested for possession of classified material on security operations.
The charge was disputed by their employee Reuters, that the two were set up by police after probing the massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslims during a military crackdown. Detention of the journalists gave rise to condemnation all over the world. US Vice President Mike Pence asked Aung San Suu Kyi to intervene. Rights groups has criticised the trial as a sham and an attempt to cover-up the September 2017 massacre in Inn Din village in Myanmar's Rakhine state. Suu Kyi still has to speak widely regarding the reporters.
During the trial a whistle-blowing policeman told the court his superior ordered a sting to entrap the reporters.
"This seven-year jail sentence is a mistake," the journalists' lawyer L Khun Ring Pan told the bench, in a hearing attended by embassy officials and free media advocates as well as the wives of the jailed journalists.
"They were trying to find out who was involved with the (Inn Din) case. That's why they tried to meet the police... they did not ask for anything secret."
More than 720,000 Rohingya have fled Rakhine state to Bangladesh since the military's crackdown last August, bringing accounts of rape, arson and mass killings.
UN investigators have said the evidence warrants charges of genocide against the country's top generals, but the army maintains it was defending itself against Rohingya militants.
"We hope for fairness. We want them to be free," Wa Lone's wife Pan Ei Mon said.
Media advocates say the journalists' convictions under the British colonial-era official secrets law aimed to muzzle media investigating allegations of atrocities in Rakhine and other sensitive issues in Myanmar as it emerges from decades of junta rule.
"This is unacceptable for a country that claims to be transitioning towards democracy," Daniel Bastard from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said.
Myanmar dropped six places in RSF's latest World Press Freedom Index.
Outside the country the two young men have been feted with awards presented in their absence and hailed as heroes.
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were also jointly named Time Magazine's Person of the Year this month, alongside other persecuted and slain journalists, as concerns grow for deteriorating press freedoms around the world.
The anniversary of their arrest was marked by newsrooms publishing photos of their staff flashing two thumbs up, a defiant gesture Wa Lone made at court that became synonymous with the duo's resilience.
