Anna Koucká

Moderator

Linn Thant

Expert

Linn Thant was born into an Anglo-Indian Burmese family in central Myanmar in the 1960s. He studied in the government schools of Burma and the Christian mission schools founded by his grandfather, the British. He actively participated in social organizations as a child. After graduating from high school in basic education and studied civil engineering courses. He actively participated in the 1988 democracy movement at that time in the Ba.Ka.Tha organization (All Burma Federation of Student Unions - ABFFSU). 

After the 1988 military coup, he went into hiding and became an active member of the ABSDF. He was arrested during an ABSDF’s mission in Rangoon and sentenced to death by a military court on May 25, 1990. After about 3 years on death row at Insein Prison, where death row prisoners are kept, the death sentence was replaced by a life sentence (similar to 20 years) in 1993 to welcome the National Assembly, which was changed by the SLORC junta's amnesty order. In 1997, he was transferred from Insein Prison to Thayet Prison. He was released from Thayet prison at the end of 2008. After being released from prison, he reunited the network of 88 generation students. He also organized an educational network for political activism. Then, after leaving Myanmar while being hunted by military intelligence in the case of the photos recorded in the prison, he lived in Thailand. He worked as an English teacher at the Thinking Classroom Foundation and as a reporter and commentator at the Irrawaddy news agency based in Chiang Mai, Thailand since 2010. 

In 2011, he received political asylum in the Czech Republic and returned to Thailand to continue working at the Irrawaddy news agency. In 2015, he moved from Thailand to the Czech Republic and wrote weekly political and business reviews on Myanmar and Asia for the Denik Referendum newspaper based in Brno, Czech Republic. 

In addition, he taught English and Mindfulness in the Czech Republic's preschool and the Center for Modern Education's elementary and secondary schools. Since 2018, he has been engaged in the business of importing Burmese coffee from Burma and distributing it in the Czech Republic and Europe. He is a Chairman of Asociace NUG z.s and an Executive of Spring Invest & Trade s.r.o. 

On April 24, 2021, he was appointed the representative of the Government of National Unity in the Czech Republic. As a representative, he is actively working for the National Unity Government of Myanmar in the Czech Republic and European countries. He is serving as a representative of NUG based in the Czech Republic in the implementation of NUG's foreign policies, including the recognition of the National Unity Government to other partner countries.