A decade after fleeing across Burma's borders following the popular uprising against military rule in 1988, student exiles in Thailand, India, Bangladesh and China are still carrying a torch for the pro-democracy struggle.
Through relentless lobbying and painstaking documentation of human rights abuses in their homeland, renamed Myanmar since 1989, student veterans who fought a guerrilla war against the Burmese junta are at the forefront of the campaign for freedom.
In the days before his death last Saturday, they were burning candles in Bangkok for Michael Aris, the husband of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
They also demanded the release of Min Ko Naing, the charismatic student leader who led the 1988 protests that almost toppled the military. He has been in prison in Burma for ten years.
Aung Naing Oo, 34, of the All Burma Students' Democratic Front, said: "I'm a bit old to call myself a student, but we still see ourselves as students, as in Burma it's a group that plays a leading role in politics."
The front is the main student exile group with more than 1,000 members, among an estimated 5,000 university and high school students who have escaped Burma since the 1988 clampdown, in which thousands were gunned down or arrested.
For eight years they fought alongside ethnic insurgents in the malarial jungles along the Thai-Burma border, but as the Rangoon military machine, the Tatmadaw, gathered strength, they decided instead to concentrate efforts on winning hearts and minds.
The front, which is outlawed in Burma and routinely branded as a terrorist outfit by the junta, has agents inside the country, who at great personal risk gather information about forced labour, mass relocations and persecution of dissidents. They also prepare and distribute information on human rights.
In January, one member was imprisoned for 54 years for carrying "seditious" literature, said Aung Naing Oo.
About half of Burma's estimated 1,400 political prisoners are believed to be students.
But as persecution inside Burma has worsened, the campaigning of the front - most of whose members live as illegal immigrants in Thailand - has grown more professional.
Using funding from international organisations and governments, they have published a stream of books on human rights abuses in Burma, including personal accounts of torture inside Rangoon's notorious Insein prison.