Pro-democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi was briefly released from her house arrest in Burma today to meet with a visiting US delegation for talks.

Ms Suu Kyi was driven to a lakeside hotel where she was greeted by US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell for a two hour meeting.

Mr Campbell, the top US diplomat for East Asia, is the highest-ranking American official to visit the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 14 years.

The 64-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate has been detained for 14 of the past 20 years, mostly under house arrest and for shorter periods at Burma's notorious Insein Prison.

Ms Suu Kyi, dressed in a pink traditional Burmese jacket, was upbeat as she emerged from the hotel and joked with photographers who asked her to smile.

“Do I look pretty when I smile,” Ms Suu Kyi said as she smiled for the cameras.

“Hello to you all,” she said, before getting into a car that took her back to her tightly guarded home.

The subject of the talks is not yet known.

Mr Campbell and his deputy, Scot Marciel, are the highest-level Americans to visit Burma since 1995. Their two-day trip, which included talks with senior junta officials, stems from a new US policy that reverses the Bush administration’s isolation of the country in favour of dialogue. Burma has been ruled by the military since 1962.

The US visit is the second step in “the beginning of a dialogue with Burma,” said State Department spokesman Ian Kelly after meetings with the junta.

“They laid out the way we see this relationship going forward, how we should structure this dialogue,” Mr Kelly said. “But they were mainly in a listening mode.”

Mr Campbell later met for about an hour with six senior members of Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party at its headquarters. He was also to visit leaders of other parties before departing.

Ms Suu Kyi was recently sentenced to an additional 18 months of house arrest for briefly sheltering an uninvited American, in a trial that drew global international condemnation. The sentence means she will not be able to participate in next year’s elections, which will be the first in two decades.

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