Burma's opposition party is to boycott polls expected later this year, after the country's military rulers introduced a controversial new election law.
The National League For Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, decided at a party meeting to refuse to register for the first polls to be held in two decades in Burma, officially known as Myanmar, a move that would have forced it to oust its detained leader and recognise the junta's constitution.
But the NLD now faces dissolution in less than six weeks for failing to register, according to the new legislation brought in earlier this month for the elections due to be held by the end of November.
‘The National League for Democracy has decided not to register the party,’ party spokesman Nyan Win said after a meeting of more than 100 senior members at NLD headquarters in the economic hub Yangon.
Under the internationally-criticised election legislation, if the party had decided to sign up for the vote it would have been forced to part with Ms Suu Kyi because she is serving a prison term.
The vote is part of the government's seven-step ‘Roadmap to Democracy’, which also includes a controversial new constitution agreed in a 2008 referendum held days after a cyclone ravaged the country.
Burma's election legislation nullifies the result of the last polls held in 1990 that were won by the NLD by a landslide but never recognised by the junta.
If the party had registered it would have been forced to recognise that decision.
Nobel peace laureate Ms Suu Kyi, who has spent 14 of the past 20 years in detention, said last week she would ‘never accept’ her party registering because the laws are ‘unjust’.
The elections are expected to be held in the last week of October or early November, according to a senior regime official.
