French capital to strip Suu Kyi of freedom of Paris award over Myanmar’s Rohingya crackdown

The Paris mayor’s office will strip Aung San Suu Kyi of her honorary freedom of the French capital, over her failure to speak out against a crackdown on Myanmar’s Rohingya minority. Mayor Anne Hidalgo decided to revoke the honor because of the “multiple violations of human rights recorded in Myanmar and the violence and persecution by Myanmar’s security forces against the Rohingya minority,” the mayor’s spokeswoman told AFP on Friday. The move, which follows similar decisions by Glasgow, Edinburgh and Oxford, would make Myanmar’s de facto leader the first person to lose the freedom of the French capital, a symbolic award. The procedure will be finalized by the city council at a meeting in mid-December. Suu Kyi’s supporters say that she has no powers to rein in the army.