18, Dec 2017 | CJP Team

A government spokesman told Reuters that Myanmar’s President Htin Kyaw has permitted the police to go ahead with a case against two Reuters journalists who were arrested last week. According to Reuters, the Ministry of Information last week said they had “illegally acquired information with the intention to share it with foreign media”, and that they were being investigated under Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act of 1923. The journalists were covering the Rohingya crisis. Reuters reported that several governments, including the Britain, Canada, and the United States, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Reuters’ editor-in-chief, and reporters’ and human rights groups have condemned their arrest as violating the freedom of the press.