Twenty-seven Burmese asylum seekers were sentenced to five months' jail today by the Kuala Lumpur magistrate's court after pleading guilty to charges of illegal assembly, failure to disperse and non-possession of valid travel documents.

They were from an original group of 64 Burmese activists who were charged after their arrest in mid-June under Section 27 (5) and 27 (4) of the Police Act and Section 6 (1) (c) of the 1967 Immigration Act respectively.

Sentenced to three months for each offence under the Police Act and five months for the immigration offence, Magistrate Nazran Mohd Sham ordered the terms to take effect from the date of their arrest.

The 27 will be transferred from the Sungai Buloh Prison, where they had been remanded, to the Semenyih immigration detention centre.

"Trying to get their release from Semenyih is another ordeal altogether," said their lawyer Amer Hamzah Arshad when met later.

Nazran fixed Jan 3 for the remaining 48 asylum seekers who claimed trail. These include four women arrested at the Pudu police station while visiting others who had been detained earlier for illegal assembly.

One of the four, who possessed a Burmese passport, had been charged under Section 15 of the Immigration Act for staying beyond the expiry of her visa.

Acknowledged by Asean

In the demonstration held in front of the Burmese embassy in Kuala Lumpur which led to their arrest, the activists were commemorating the 60th birthday of detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and protesting against the Burmese military junta.

Earlier, Amer told the court that the asylum-seekers were merely exercising their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.

Moreover, the substance of their peaceful protest being the abuses of the military government in Burma and the continued detention of Suu Kyi had been acknowledged by Asean itself, he said.