AKIPRESS.COM - Canada has revoked Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary citizenship, the latest of several honours taken away from Myanmar’s de facto leader since last year’s military crackdown on minority Rohingya Muslims, media reports say.

The country’s Senate voted to strip her of the honour on Tuesday, following a vote by the House of Commons to approve the same motion last week. Canada bestowed the honour in 2007, and she is the first to have lost it.

Ratna Omidvar, the senator who introduced the motion, said Aung San Suu Kyi’s silence in the face of the violence against the Rohingya, which killed many thousands of people and sent more than 700,000 from the country’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh, needed to be condemned.

Myanmar’s de facto leader has no power over the military, but a UN fact-finding mission in August concluded that Aung San Suu Kyi, who serves as state counsellor and foreign minister, had “not used her de facto position as head of government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events in Rakhine state”.

The body said that Myanmar’s top military generals should be investigated and prosecuted for genocide.