AT A rundown lakeside house in Rangoon, the world’s most prominent political prisoner will mark her 60th birthday alone this weekend, cut off from her family and supporters by Burma’s junta.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize-winning pro-democracy leader who has spent the best part of a decade under house arrest, will have little to celebrate on Sunday.

Her only companions are a cook and the secret police agents who have turned her two-storey home into a prison. Her only visitors are two physicians and her contact with the outside world is limited to state-run television, government newspapers and a radio.

The sense of isolation is reinforced by the fact that the Burmese military remains firmly in power, while her movement, which won a landslide election back in 1990, has been broken up with its members in hiding or under arrest. Yet the cause espoused by the small, striking and stubborn campaigner, who has championed peaceful resistance against a regime that rarely hesitates to use force, is far from forgotten.

Today her birthday is being marked with demonstrations by hundreds of supporters around the world outside 16 Burmese embassies calling for her release.

In Washington, Tom Lantos, the Democrat congressman, will deliver 6,000 birthday cards to the Burmese mission while R.E.M., the American rock group, will perform a birthday song on Sunday at a concert in Dublin that will be be broadcast in Burma on a dissident television station.

Tomorrow her son Kim Aris, by her late British husband, Michael Aris, will receive the freedom of the city of Edinburgh on her behalf.

Her cause is also being taken up by the international community, including Britain, which is working to bring more pressure to bear on Rangoon through Asian states with close ties to Burma.

Yesterday Kofi Annan, the United Nations SecretaryGeneral, called on Rangoon to free her and said that he had raised the matter with General Than Shwe, the head of Burma’s military Government.

Tony Blair has also promised to use Britain’s presidency of the European Union in the second half of this year to tighten sanctions against Burma unless it complies. Scores of key figures in the regime and their families are banned from travelling to the EU under targeted sanctions.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said yesterday that Britain wanted not only Aung San Suu Kyi but several hundred other political prisoners freed. “The Burmese authorities should begin a genuine process of reform and political dialogue, involving all political parties and ethnic groups, to achieve national reconciliation so that the Burmese people can at last live in peace and freedom,” he said. “Releasing Aung San Suu Kyi is not only a moral imperative but a crucial step to start this process.”

The international action coincided with a report released by Amnesty International detailing human rights abuses in Burma. It said that the military was holding at least 1,350 political prisoners, ranging from opposition leaders to student activists, and even a goldsmith sentenced to three years for making a replica of a peasant’s hat, the symbol of the opposition National League for Democracy.

Irene Khan, Amnesty’s secretary-general, said: “The justice system, which should be protecting the human rights of all the citizens of Myanmar (Burma), is being systematically misused to deny and restrict the right to peaceful exercise of freedom of expression, association and assembly.”

At least three have died in custody in suspicious circumstances this year and scores more prisoners have reportedly been tortured. In one incident on April 28, 22 political prisoners were allegedly tortured and ill-treated after taking part in a hunger strike at the infamous Insein prison, Amnesty said.

UNDER TYRANNY

• Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the National League for Democracy, will have spent 2,523 days under house arrest on her birthday this Sunday
• At least 1,350 political prisoners are held in Burma. At least three have died in custody since January
• Five opposition MPs were jailed in February and March, more than in the previous 21 months
• At least ten ethnic Shan politicians were also arrested in February, and denied access to family members
• Last year Burma released nearly 20,000 prisoners, but only 110 were believed to be political prisoners

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