The prisoner Laos would rather forget

You can hear it in their agitated voices and see it in their exasperated expressions. They wish she wasn't in their prison, they wish she wasn't in their country, and they probably wish she had never been caught when she tried to board a plane in Vientiane last August with 680 grams of heroin hidden beneath her clothes.

For the stern Communist officials who run Laos, the case of 20-year-old Briton Samantha Orobator - awaiting trial on heroin smuggling charges that could technically still bring her the death penalty - has become an embarrassment this landlocked Southeast Asian backwater could do without.

What started out as a straightforward case of a young foreign woman acting with what appears to have been crass stupidity has instead turned into a process that has brought the unwelcome, harsh light of international scrutiny on the controlling and secretive regime that runs this poverty-stricken nation of 6 million.

The thing that has made Orobator's case a human rights issue is not the manner of her arrest or the conditions in which she is being held in Vientiane's notorious Phonthong Prison. Rather, it is the fact that, eight months after her arrest, she is now five months pregnant.

The Laos government refuses to say how she became pregnant but insists stubbornly it is 'impossible' that she might have been raped inside the jail or made pregnant by a prison guard, still defying logic in some interviews to claim she has been pregnant since before her arrest.

Orobator, who until recent days had no access to a lawyer, was even made to sign a statement in prison declaring she had not been raped and that the father of her baby was not from Laos, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed in March.