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Rare footage of Aung San Suu Kyi inside a Myanmar courtroom and detailed records of her daily prison routine have been seen by the Guardian, offering a glimpse into the life of the country’s ousted civilian leader as she nears her 80th birthday.
Since the military seized power in February 2021, little has been seen or heard of Aung San Suu Kyi, who led Myanmar for six years before her arrest. She is held in solitary confinement with access to the outside world strictly controlled and only rare supervised visits from her legal team.
The videos, dated August and December 2022, show Aung San Suu Kyi appearing in a makeshift courtroom with deposed president Win Myint during military-run corruption trials that were condemned by the UN, US and EU as politically motivated. The cases contributed to her 33-year prison sentence.
The footage and logs – shown to the Guardian by military defector group People’s Embrace – shed light on her condition and routine, amid concerns from her family and supporters that her health has seriously deteriorated and her life may be at risk.
The logs cover a handful of days in January and February 2024 and detail a regimented life inside a specially built detention facility in Naypyidaw, the capital, in which she remains isolated from the outside world and the violent civil war engulfing her country.
A Myanmar prison source, unaffiliated with the group, who last saw her in early 2024 confirmed the material.
“Her voice and way of walking remained unchanged,” said the source. “She has stopped wearing flowers in her hair – partly because she doesn’t want to.”
Medical concerns
The records raise concerns about Aung San Suu Kyi’s health and detail the medications she receives for a range of issues.
Dr Aung Kyaw, 30, a former political prisoner jailed for treating anti-coup protesters, described her care as “rudimentary and basic”.
“It addresses only the symptoms, not the root causes,” he said, adding that poor nutrition, lack of sunlight, and the risk of dehydration and heatstroke during central Myanmar’s sweltering summer could worsen her health. The records show that on at least one day the temperature in her room reached 31C.
He added she might be especially vulnerable to Covid-19, tuberculosis and skin infections, which are common in Myanmar’s prisons.
“The health implications of keeping someone who’s almost 80 in confined space and isolation, and cutting her connection with family and friends, can have a very heavy toll on her physical and mental health.”
Meditation, reading, isolation
Logs show her days as beginning at 4.30am and ending about 8.30pm. She meditates for over an hour each morning and walks around the room for evening exercise, using Buddhist prayer beads throughout the day.
In one entry, she is recorded having a lunch of “two spoons of rice, chicken, fish balls soup, two pieces of chocolate, and a piece of dragon fruit” – her largest meal of the day.
Meals in general are sparse: “two half-fried eggs” for breakfast; small portions of rice, meat or fish for lunch; soup and bread for dinner.
Aung San Suu Kyi receives junta-controlled newspapers, providing some awareness of the civil war engulfing the country since 2021.
Within days of her detention, peaceful protests erupted across Myanmar, but were violently suppressed by the military. In their wake emerged civilian resistance groups, some backed by ethnic armies that have fought for borderland autonomy for decades. The conflict has claimed thousands of lives, with the military accused of widespread atrocities.
Aung San Suu Kyi has spent decades under some form of military detention; from 1989 to 2010 she was under house arrest at her family’s lakeside Yangon home because of her outspoken opposition to the military junta ruling Myanmar at that time.
During that period she maintained links with the outside world through radios on which she listened to the BBC World Service and Voice of America. In her current detention, Aung San Suu Kyi is not afforded the same privileges, however according to the source her legal team has managed to fulfil some of her requests for English-language books and French novels. The logs show she spends hours reading every day.
Her son, Kim Aris, said his last contact with her was a letter “over two years ago” focused on “family matters”.
“We know the military would censor everything. We don’t talk about anything political. I was filling her in with how my children are, and enquiring after her health, similar to what she does when she writes to me.”
He said he would feel “so much happier” if she were in her Yangon home, where she had access to a doctor and some contact with the outside world. Since its coup, the military has made several unsuccessful attempts to auction the property.
“I am extremely concerned,” Aris said. “A lot of the world seems to think she’s under house arrest, and that’s just not the case. I don’t even know if she’s alive or not – there’s no way to confirm that.”
Aris, who has been raising humanitarian funds for Myanmar, plans to run 80 kilometres over eight days ahead of her 80th birthday on 19 June.
“She never wanted me to get involved in politics, but there are ways we can help,” he said. “I’ve never seen the situation in Burma this bad. It’s getting worse every day for everybody there.”
The UN reported in January 2025 that nearly half of Myanmar’s population was living below the poverty line, with essential services crumbling and the economy in disarray.
In June 2022, Aung San Suu Kyi’s legal team ordered a birthday cake featuring her photograph, according to a source familiar with the occasion. A small celebration was held after a court hearing, where she shared the cake with court staff and guards.
Sean Turnell, an Australian economist who served as her adviser and was imprisoned in Myanmar before his release in November 2022, said she refused air conditioning because it was not available to other inmates.
“They don’t mind us [high-profile prisoners] suffering, but they don’t want us to die,” he said. “It’s a dangerous game they’re playing.”
He was sentenced in the same prefabricated courtroom shown in the videos, he said, located near the prison staff buildings within the compound in Naypyidaw.
Turnell recalled when he last saw her after two years in detention she had “lost a hell of a lot of weight”, though her spirit remained “undiminished.”
In April 2024, a junta spokesperson said Aung San Suu Kyi and Win Myint were moved to an unspecified site due to extreme heat – a claim the source believes may indicate transfer to a military compound.
‘Wait it out’
On the military’s approach to Aung San Suu Kyi, Turnell said the junta appears content to “wait it out” – but warned of consequences if she were to die in custody.
“There would be incredible anger in Burma,” he said, adding that her death could push non-aligned people into resistance.
Inside Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi remains a revered figure – the daughter of independence hero Aung San and a symbol of the country’s pro-democracy struggle.
Yet her international standing collapsed after 2017, when she defended Myanmar against genocide allegations at the international court of justice over military atrocities against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Nearly a million Rohingya fled Myanmar to refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh.
Democracy activist Nilar Thein, widow of dissident Ko Jimmy whose execution by the junta in 2022 caused international outrage, said the military fears Aung San Suu Kyi “because they know she would expose their wrongdoings” and “reinvigorate the resistance”.
But, she added, the movement was not dependent on Aung San Suu Kyi’s release.
“This is a popular uprising driven by the people themselves,” she said. “And it will continue to move forward.”
The charges against the Nobel laureate – incitement, electoral fraud and corruption – have been dismissed by rights groups as a sham. In August 2023, the junta issued a partial pardon, reducing her sentence to 27 years – meaning she would be released aged 105.
She is one of more than 29,200 people detained since the 2021 coup, according to monitoring group the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners.
The junta did not respond to a request for comment.
