The first legal bid to free Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from more than a year of house arrest has failed, her party said Tuesday.
Papers lodged with a court in Yangon attempting to force the military regime to free the leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), her deputy Tin Oo and open party offices across the country were rejected because of a legal technicality, said spokesman U Lwin.
"The Yangon divisional court refused to accept the NLD's submission on the grounds that no affidavits had been attached to it," he said.
Aung San Suu Kyi was detained after a violent clash between her supporters and a pro-junta mob in May 2003 and was later put under house arrest for a third time.
The arrests, accompanied by the closure of NLD offices across the country, sparked international fury and tightened sanctions on the junta that has ruled Myanmar since 1962.
The NLD won elections by a landslide in 1990 that the international community considered free and fair but the party was never allowed to rule.
A Myanmar legal expert told AFP the legal bid failed because officials at the court refused to sign it for fear of reprisals by the regime. Without their signatures, other officials would not consider the petition, the expert said.
However the NLD, which last month launched a nation-wide petition to seek the release of its leadership, said it would fight on.
"We will exhaust all other legal avenues to get Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin Oo released," said U Lwin.
The failed legal move came after the regime on Sunday faced down US demands to release Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate in 1991, and reform its political process as the price for normalising relations between the two countries.
Myanmar dismissed US criticisms claiming a seven-step programme of reform it announced last August would eventually lead to elections and avoid "bloodshed, hardship and chaos".
The US and the European Union, Myanmar's sternest critics, have dismissed the reform process as a sham hastily introduced in response to sanctions that have hit Myanmar hard.
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