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Dozens of journalists marched in Yangon on Saturday to protest against the suspension of two journals amid fears that officials might be backing off pledges to ease strict junta-era censorship laws.

Journalists wearing shirts bearing their campaign slogan "Stop Killing Press", march in Yangon on Saturday, an event that would have been unheard of two years ago.

The reporters, many wearing black T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan "Stop Killing Press" in Burmese and English, marched to several sites across Yangon, including the two publishing houses behind the suspended weeklies.

Stifling censorship was one of the key symbols of junta-led Myanmar, where even seemingly innocuous details were scrubbed from public discussion and publications were frequently pulled for comments deemed damaging to the authoritarian rulers.

The government had recently taken a lighter touch with some of the less controversial publications as part of reforms sweeping the former army-ruled nation, prompting some editors to test the boundaries of the new found freedoms.

In June Tint Swe, head of the Press Scrutiny and Registration Department (PSRD), told AFP there "will be no press scrutiny job" from the end of that month, also insisting there would be "no monitoring" of local journals and magazines.

A petition by the newly formed press freedom committee called for an end to all "oppressive" media laws.

"We have seven demands which we are sending in a letter to the president to remove the oppressive laws covering the media," Zaw Thet Htwe, a spokesman for the independent committee told AFP on phone.

The demands include an immediate lifting of suspensions of the publications, scrapping censorship and a promise to consult journalists on the crafting of a new media law, he added.

The editor of the Voice Weekly, Kyaw Min Swe, last week said the ban on his publication related to the front-page story on a cabinet reshuffle and cartoons criticising the current media freedoms in the country. A more open climate has encouraged private weekly news publications publish an increasingly bold range of stories, including those about opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose very name was taboo in the past.

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Media protest in Yangon