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| Aung San Suu Kyi is due to speak in September at a human rights forum in the Czech republic alongside the Dalai Lama. |
Democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama will attend a human rights forum in Prague next month, its spokesman said.
Burma’s opposition leader and the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, both Nobel peace laureates, will speak during the forum, spokesman Filip Sebek told AFP.
He said no official talks were scheduled between the pair, but did not discount the possibility that they would meet in private – a meeting likely to anger China.
Beijing, a powerful ally of Burma and major investor in the resource-rich nation, has branded the Dalai Lama an anti-China “separatist”.
Suu Kyi, who spent 15 years under house arrest until she was freed after controversial elections in 2010, is now an MP as part of sweeping reforms under a new quasi-civilian regime that came to power in 2011.
She will be visiting the Czech Republic for the first time, after embarking on a landmark European tour last year.
The annual forum was launched by the late Czech Velvet Revolution icon Vaclav Havel and American Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in 1997.
This year’s theme is “societies in transition”, with US folk singer and activist Joan Baez and South Africa’s last white president Frederik Willem de Klerk also in attendance.
“The aim is to better understand what is needed during the transition from an authoritarian regime to a democracy but also to better understand the things that cause these processes to grind to a halt or lose their way,” executive director Jakub Klepal said in a statement.
