“They were not jailed because they were journalists, they were jailed because...the court has decided that they have broken the Official Secrets Act,” she said.

She broke her silence on the controversial issue while attending an international economics conference in Vietnam. She also admitted that her government could in hindsight have handled the Rohingya crisis differently.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested in December while reporting on the killing of ten Rohingya Muslim men in the village of Inn Din, Rakhine state, last September. Seven Burmese soldiers have since been sentenced to ten years of hard labour for their role in the crime.

The subsequent jailing of the reporters has been widely condemned by international leaders, including Jeremy Hunt, the British foreign secretary. Reuters has maintained that the two men were framed on “false charges” intended to “silence their reporting and intimidate the press.”