In September, both Ms. Bowman and her husband, the Burmese artist Htein Lin, were sentenced to one year in prison for allegedly breaking the Immigration Act.
Former British ambassador to Myanmar, Vicky Bowman, was released from jail after allegedly violating immigration restrictions.
Ms. Bowman and her husband, the Burmese artist Htein Lin, were among the convicts released “under amnesty” to commemorate National Victory Day in Myanmar.
The pair was sentenced to one year in prison in September for “failure to register as residing at a separate address,” a violation of the Immigration Act.
Ms. Bowman served as the British ambassador to Myanmar from 2002 to 2006 and has almost three decades of expertise in the nation.
She was operating an organization that promoted ethical business practices in Myanmar at the time of their incarceration.
The imprisonment of the foreign nationals had been a subject of contention between Myanmar’s leaders and their respective home countries, which had advocated for their release.
According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a rights monitoring organization, 16,232 people have been detained in Myanmar on political charges since the military ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government in February of last year.
As of Wednesday, 13,015 detainees were still in custody, according to the AAPP, and at least 2,465 civilians have been killed by security forces during the same period.
Japanese director and Australian economist
Major General Zaw Min Tun, a government spokeswoman, told Voice of Myanmar and Yangon Media Group that Japanese filmmaker Toru Kubota, Australian economist Sean Turnell, and an unidentified American were also released and deported.
Mr. Turnell, a 58-year-old associate professor of economics at Sydney’s Macquarie University, was arrested at a hotel in Yangon by security agents.
In September, he was given a three-year prison sentence for violating the nation’s official secrets law and immigration law.
O’Connor of Amnesty International Australia stated that Mr. Turnell, like many others, should have never been arrested or imprisoned.
“Thousands of people imprisoned in Myanmar since the coup were innocent,” he said.
Mr. Kubota, a 26-year-old documentary filmmaker based in Tokyo, was arrested by plainclothes police in Yangon in July after photographing and filming a small protest against the military takeover last year.
He was convicted of incitement and other charges for his participation in the protest and sentenced to 10 years in prison last month.
The ousted leader still in jail
Myanmar’s deposed leader remains incarcerated in the country after being sentenced on the same day as Ms. Bowman to an additional three years in prison, in addition to the 17 years she is already serving for a variety of offenses, including alleged election fraud.
Ms. Suu Kyi’s party won the general election by a landslide in 2020, but on 1 February 2021, the military seized power from the elected government, citing allegations of widespread voter fraud.
