The European Union will impose new sanctions on the Burmese government and its supporters if Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Laureate and opposition leader, is not freed at the end of her current trial, a senior British official said.

Mrs Suu Kyi, who has spent 13 of the last 19 years under house arrest, faces up to five years in jail if she is convicted of breaking the terms of her detention by allowing John Yettaw, an American, to stay the night after he swam uninvited across the lake behind her house in Rangoon last May.