Detained Myanmar leader Suu Kyi has first foreign visitor in five years

First publicised meeting between the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a foreign official held since she was ousted in a military coup in February 2021.

Former Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, overthrown and detained more than five years ago in a military coup that plunged the country into civil war, has been allowed to meet a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for the first time since she was deposed, after years of questions about the health and wellbeing of the 81-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Suu Kyi met with Arnaud de Baecque, Myanmar resident representative of the ICRC, on Monday in the capital, Naypyitaw, a government spokesperson said.

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“The visit was carried out in accordance with the ICRC’s standards and procedures for visiting people deprived of liberty. This included the opportunity to speak with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in private,” the ICRC said in a statement, using an honorific for the veteran politician. The statement added that detention visits provide people the chance to exchange news with their families.

Suu Kyi’s son said the Red Cross visit was the first positive development concerning the democracy campaigner in more than five years.

“This may be a first step, but it must not be the last,” Kim Aris said in a statement. “I hope this leads to further humanitarian progress, including direct contact with my mother, access for our family, credible and independently verified information about her well-being, and ultimately her immediate and unconditional release, together with all political prisoners.”

Aris added that he has not yet received independent confirmation of his mother’s condition or wellbeing. Aris previously told the Reuters news agency that he had not heard from his mother in years and feared that she could die without him knowing.

One of four photographs provided by the Myanmar government shows Suu Kyi dressed in traditional Burmese attire and standing ‌unaided, shaking hands with Baecque. In another, they sit in a wood-panelled room containing two chairs and a desk. The third image shows Suu Kyi cutting a birthday cake, and the fourth shows the cake with text reading: “Happy Birthday Aunty Suu 29.6.2026”. The date and location of the images have not been verified.

Myanmar’s military government said in December that Suu Kyi was “in good health”. After a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in Bangkok last month, Thailand’s top diplomat, Sihasak Phuangketkeow, called for access to Suu Kyi “so that we can be able to verify the claims”.

The coup leader who deposed Suu Kyi, Min Aung Hlaing, became Myanmar’s civilian president in April after highly restricted elections.

Later that month, Suu Kyi was moved to house arrest after Min Aung Hlaing said he had reduced her sentence by one-sixth as part of an amnesty for thousands of prisoners, which also saw the release of her ally, former President Win Myint. The charges against her are widely regarded as bogus and politically motivated.

She now has 18 more years of her sentence to serve. It’s not the first period of her life she has spent in detention. A previous military government held her under house arrest over three periods that totalled 15 years, starting in 1989 and ending in 2010.

Throughout her years in detention, her popularity only grew. Her father was a revered general regarded as the father of the modern nation for leading the resistance movement that won the country’s freedom from its colonial ruler Britain but who was assassinated by a rival in 1947, just six months before independence was formally declared.

Suu Kyi became a national and international icon in her own right, beloved by the many millions of Myanmar citizens who hated military rule and feted abroad as an elegant prisoner of conscience. When the army briefly flirted with a transition to democracy, her National League for Democracy (NLD) party won two successive elections in 2015 and 2020.

When the military wrote a new constitution, it included language that barred Suu Kyi from becoming president. President Htin Kyaw of the NLD, however, appointed her state counsellor, which made her de facto leader of the short-lived democratically elected government.

In the years before she was overthrown in the latest coup, her international image was tarnished by her apparent disdain for a Muslim minority group in Myanmar, the Rohingya, and her failure to stop genocidal violence against them that drove almost their entire population out of the country.