YANGON, Myanmar, Aug. 12 (UPI) -- As world leaders condemn Myanmar, pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is headed back to the courts after her lawyers said they would appeal her sentence.
Suu Kyi, 64 and a Nobel peace laureate, was given another 18 months of house arrest in a surprise move by the court.
The winner of the country's 1990 general election, who has spent 14 of the past 19 years under some form of imprisonment, faced up to five years in jail for breaking the terms of her house arrest in the capital Yangon, formerly Rangoon.
U.S. citizen John Yettaw swam across a lake and entered her home uninvited. He stayed for two days despite efforts by Suu Kyi and her two female aids to persuade him to leave.
The controversial trial, whose guilty outcome was predicted by most observers and international organizations, ended with a sentence of three years in jail with hard labor.
But immediately after pronouncing the verdict, the country's interior minister, Maj. Gen. Maung Oo, read a statement in court commuting the sentence to 18 months' house arrest.
Suu Kyi's lawyer, Nyan Win, said her team would appeal because they were ''not satisfied'' with the court's ruling. ''We assume that the judgment is totally wrong according to the law," Win is quoted as saying in agency reports.
Lawyers for Yettaw, a devout Mormon who claims God told him to get in touch with Suu Kyi, said they, too, would appeal his sentence. The court handed him seven years of hard labor despite the fact that he is in poor health and is said to have had several seizures since being arrested in May.
Some observers said the commuting of the sentence was to appease international criticism of the trial and calls by leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama and U.N Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for Suu Kyi to be released.
Suu Kyi, as leader of the League for Democracy Party, won a landslide victory in a 1990 general election, but the military junta refused to recognize the results. This week's sentence, while appearing lenient, will likely mean that she is not eligible for an election that the generals plan for next year.
An editorial in the government newspaper New Light of Myanmar, just after the verdict was handed down, warned people not to take to the streets to demonstrate against the verdict. Similarly in an editorial before the trial concluded, it blamed foreign powers for trying to destabilize Myanmar, formerly called Burma.
While Western leaders and media have heavily criticized Myanmar and called for embargoes, the country's Asian neighbors are less likely to join in. Criticism of the verdict was more muted in Asia, where Myanmar has many trading partners including China and India, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph newspaper in London.
Ian Holliday, a Burma expert at the University of Hong Kong, told the Telegraph that the Burmese regime expects that its neighbors will tolerate the sentence. "This is a very calibrated verdict in that everybody knows that the West is going to be unhappy," he said.
"The regime is calculating that by commuting it down to one-and-a-half years and by allowing her to serve in her home rather than in prison, most Asian states will be prepared to go along with that."
