Last year on this blog I wrote about the 10-year jail term handed to former Burmese army captain Nay Myo Zin. After leaving the military he gained a profile as a charity worker, and volunteered with a blood donation group run by members of the opposition National League for Democracy. In April last year, police claimed to have found documents on his laptop that defamed the Burmese military, and he was jailed under the Electronics Act.

He became the first political prisoner of President Thein Sein’s pseudo-civilian government, which came to power in March last year, the month before his arrest. After undergoing torture and the pain of living for months in his cell with a broken vertebra, he was freed in the 13 January amnesty of prisoners.

But now he finds himself back in the dock facing a possible six months in prison on ludicrous charges – when he was allowed out of his cell in August last year to receive (inadequate) treatment for his injury, a friend handed him a t-shirt and key-ring bearing the image of Aung San Suu Kyi. Even under the ‘progressive’ government of Thein Sein, those were considered prohibited items. So only two weeks after walking free (or indeed staggering, given doctors were unable to fix his bone), he is staring down the barrel of another jail term. “Given that they are seriously building this case with accounts from prosecution witnesses, police and the [police intelligence], I guess they plan to make sure that I go down,” he told the Democratic Voice of Burma yesterday.

Several things strike me as worthy of raising: first, if sentenced, he will again become the first political prisoner of a “new” era, as he did when he was jailed last year. Awarding the same distinction twice to one person is quite a feat, and points to the palpable anger felt by the regime that one of their men, indeed a captain, had U-turned so spectacularly to join the opposition – that would be considered the most heinous form of dissent. Burma’s government has long framed the military as the country’s most prestigious institution, and until its degeneration into a mob of youths cavorting in the borderlands on salaries of just $US10 a month, it was a feted profession.

His former status probably explains why the government is going after him with such zeal – he is the public face of a widespread, but mostly silent, disillusionment among troops, particularly low-ranking fodder who desert in their dozens each year and are often forced to flee the country. Were he just a regular opposition member, then it’s unlikely they would arrest him a second time, especially now.

What his case also points to is the ongoing wielding of legal powers that are wholly inconsistent with the image the new government is trying to project. How can a country claiming to be transitioning to democracy (at an alarming speed, as many international observers proclaim) threaten a jail term for an individual on the grounds that they received a picture of somebody, particularly when that somebody may soon become a part of the government?

Suu Kyi herself took that challenge right to the government yesterday when she called for an overhaul of the country’s constitution, which was written by the former junta and rushed through in the weeks following Cyclone Nargis in 2008, when millions would have been unable to reach the voting booth. Overturning the raft of laws designed to penalise the opposition is a mammoth task – in the short term though, signs suggest the government is responding to public pressure, and the farcical nature of Nay Myo Zin’s case should be hammered home by the many diplomats currently engaging with the government.