A Euro MP and four activists were ordered immediately deported from Laos today after receiving two-year suspended jail terms for mounting a pro-democracy protest in one of the world's last surviving communist states.
Mr Olivier Dupuis and his co-defendants - three Italians and a Russian - were also ordered to pay fines of two million kip ($200) and costs of 5,000 kip (50 cents) after the three-hour trial.
The president of the three-judge panel, Mr Phaivi Siboripha, said the five had been found guilty of "propaganda against the Lao People's Democratic Republic" which had "damaged the country's stability and security".
Mr Dupuis and the four fellow members of his Transnational Radical Party were detained after taking part in the demonstration in Vientiane on October 26th.
It was held on the second anniversary of a similar demonstration by students in 1999, which is believed to have been the first of its kind since the communists took power following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
The French lawyer for the five, Mr Francois Zimeray, said he was glad that they would now be released from jail. They had been held in difficult conditions during their two weeks in custody, being forced to sleep on the floor and deprived of blankets and purified drinking water.
Dupuis, who represents an Italian Euro-constituency even though he is a Belgian national, was also detained in neighbouring Vietnam in June after he protested against the detention of a leading religious dissident by the communist authorities there.
But unlike the Lao authorities, Vietnam avoided the adverse publicity of a protacted detention by swiftly deporting the Euro MP.
AFP