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UNITED NATIONS: UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday renewed his appeal to Myanmar rulers to let detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi take part in upcoming polls after new election laws disqualified her.
"The Secretary General reiterates his call for the Myanmar authorities to ensure an inclusive political process leading to fair, transparent and credible elections in which all citizens of Myanmar, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, can freely participate," his office said in a statement.
In a law printed for the first time Wednesday in state newspapers, Myanmar's military junta said that anyone serving a prison term cannot be a member of a political party.
Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) - which won Myanmar's last elections in 1990 but was stopped from taking power by the junta - would in turn be abolished if it failed to obey the rules.
The United Nations said it was carefully studying the new laws, adding: "the indications available so far suggest that they do not measure up to our expectations of what is needed for an inclusive political process."
Myanmar's Political Parties Registration Act also gives the NLD just 60 days from Monday, when the law was enacted, to register as a party if it wants to take part in the elections, or else face dissolution.
The NLD has yet to announce whether it will take part in the polls promised by the junta, which are expected in October or November although the government has still not set a date.
The 64-year-old Suu Kyi has been in detention for 14 of the last 20 years since the previous elections.
She was already barred from standing as a candidate under a new constitution approved in a 2008 referendum that stipulates that those married to foreigners are ineligible. Her husband, British academic Michael Aris, died in 1999.
The Nobel Peace laureate was sentenced to three years' jail last August over an incident in which a US man swam to her lakeside home. Suu Kyi's sentence was commuted by junta supremo Than Shwe to 18 months under house arrest.
- AFP/sc
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