In news from Burma, pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is being barred from taking part in elections proposed by the country’s military leaders for 2010. Earlier this month, Burma’s military junta announced a referendum in May on a new constitution, to be followed by an election in 2010. Under the new constitution, Burmese citizens who are married to foreigners will be disqualified from running for office. Aung San Suu Kyi’s deceased husband was born in Britain. David Scott Mathieson of Human Rights Watch criticized the Burmese military junta.

David Scott Mathieson: “The military have made it very clear that they don’t think that Aung San Suu Kyi should have some kind of role in the politics of Burma. So the past twenty years really have been a process of finding ways to exclude her from the entire process. So this constitution is rigged so that Aung San Suu Kyi and people like her can’t actually contest elections in the future. Anyone who is married to a foreigner or whose children actually hold foreign citizenship are barred from actually standing for elections in Burma under the rules and provisions of this present constitution.”

The military junta last held elections in 1990, but ignored them when Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won a landslide. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate has spent more than twelve of the past eighteen years under some form of detention.