Suu Kyi plans visit to Britain and Norway

Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Burma's democracy movement and Nobel laureate, is to leave the country for the first time in 24 years to visit Britain and Norway.

She is expected to leave for Oslo in June to collect her Nobel Peace Prize - awarded in 1991 when she was under house arrest - and then travel to London to thank Britain for its support for sanctions against Burma's former military regime.

The visit will also mark an emotional return to Oxford, the home she left for Burma in 1988 and where her late husband, Dr Michael Aris, died from cancer in 1999. Miss Suu Kyi, who has spent 15 of the last 20 years under house arrest, chose not to visit him during his illness because she feared that the Burmese government would not honour a promise to allow her to return.

Her readiness to leave Burma now is seen as highly symbolic and reflects a new trust between her National League for Democracy and President Thein Sein following her landslide victory in a series of parliamentary by-elections earlier this month.

Miss Suu Kyi was invited to visit Britain by David Cameron when he met her in Rangoon last week. Plans for her visit were confirmed by Nyan Win, a spokesman for the NLD, who said she would visit Oxford, where she was a student in the 1970s. She is expected to be awarded an honorary doctorate there.

News of her travel plans will also reassure the international community, which has started to ease sanctions against the Burma, that she remains confident reforms will continue.