Effectively a prisoner in her homeland of Burma, the pro-democracy activist Ms Aung San Suu Kyi will today become a freewoman of Dublin.
While the 1991 Nobel Peace prize-winner is no longer under house arrest, her movements are restricted and meetings of her party, the National League for Democracy, remain banned.
The military junta, which refused to relinquish power when she swept to a landslide election victory in 1990, continues to clamp down on her activities.
She is frequently stopped from travelling outside the Burmese capital, Rangoon. In July 1998, she sat for six days in her car in protest against one such military road-block.
Born in 1945, Ms Suu Kyi is the daughter of Aung San, a hero of the independence movement and resistance to the Japanese who was killed when she was aged two.
She was educated in Rangoon until 1960, when her mother became ambassador to India. She studied at Delhi University and later at St Hugh's College, Oxford, between 1964 and 1967. There, she met the British academic Mr Michael Aris. They married and had two children.
She worked as a research officer for the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Bhutan before returning to Rangoon in 1988 to care for her mother. She quickly found herself swept into politics, however, and spearheaded the opposition movement which won 82 per cent of the vote in the first free elections since independence.
But the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council refused to hand over power and instigated a crackdown on the opposition. On July 20th, 1989 she was put under house arrest and freed only six years later.
The military's intimidation tactics were demonstrated again last March when Ms Suu Kyi's dying husband was refused permission to travel to Burma. Instead, the regime invited the opposition leader to visit him in Britain. But, fearing she would be stopped from re-entering Burma, she never saw her husband before he died.
Ms Suu Kyi's son, Kim Aris, will collect the freedom of the city award on her behalf.
