UN human rights officials have said it is likely that \u201ccrimes under international law\u201d have been committed against the Rohingya in Myanmar and called for a body to collect evidence that could be presented in international criminal courts.<\/p>\n
Speaking to the Human Rights Council on Monday, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, said that \u201cthe repressive practices of previous military governments were returning as the norm once more\u201d in Myanmar.<\/p>\n
‘All these flashbacks come’: Rohingya\u2019s teens speak out on Myanmar brutality
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\nYee gave the strongest call yet for accountability for the crimes committed in Rahkine since August 2017 that have driven more than 700,000 Rohingya over the border to Bangladesh. The campaign of violence by the military has seen thousands killed, Rohingya villages burned to the ground and hundreds of women raped and abused.<\/p>\n
Yee called for the creation of an independent investigative body to \u201cinvestigate, document, collect, consolidate, map, and analyse evidence of human rights violations and abuses\u201d.<\/p>\n
This \u201cmaster database\u201d, she said, could then be used as the basis to put the \u201cindividuals who gave the orders and carried out violations against individuals and entire ethnic and religious groups\u201d on trial in international criminal courts or tribunals.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government leadership who did nothing to intervene, stop, or condemn these acts must also be held accountable,\u201d added Yee. Much of the international focus has been on the role of Aung San Suu Kyi in the campaign of violence. Speaking to reporters, Yee said that \u201ccomplicity is a very serious issue\u201d but added that she had a \u201clittle element of hope\u201d that the Nobel peace prize winner \u201cwill put her foot down and say once and for all let\u2019s stop this\u201d.<\/p>\n
The three experts of the UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar, who also addressed the human rights council about their ongoing investigation, were equally forthright in their condemnation.<\/p>\n
The evidence they had collected \u201cpoints at human rights violations of the most serious kind, in all likelihood amounting to crimes under international law\u201d.<\/p>\n
The UN has been denied access to Rahkine since late last year, so both Yee and the fact-finding mission have been forced to conduct their investigations in Cox\u2019s Bazaar in Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya are now living in refugee camps.<\/p>\n
Chair of the fact-finding mission, Marzuki Darusman, the former Indonesian attorney general, said the Myanmar government\u2019s continued denial of any culpability for the violence in Rahkine was \u201cuntenable\u201d.<\/p>\n
Just last week the Myanmar military released a lengthy denial stating that the Rohingya \u2013 who they refer to as \u201cillegal Bengalis\u201d\u2013 had burned down their own villages and that their own investigation had concluded \u201csecurity personnel did not commit extrajudicial killings or sexually abuse and rape women. There was no unlawful detention of people, beating, killing and arson as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Witness to a massacre: the former Myanmar soldier who saw his village burn
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\nBut Darusman said they had \u201chundreds of credible accounts of the most harrowing nature\u201d including corroborated evidence of brutal gang rapes, sexual violence against women and the killing of babies and children.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople died from gunshot wounds, often due to indiscriminate shooting at fleeing villagers. Some were burned alive in their homes \u2013 often the elderly, disabled and young children. Others were hacked to death,\u201d the experts told the human rights council.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
UN human rights officials have said it is likely that \u201ccrimes under international law\u201d have been committed against the Rohingya in Myanmar and called for a body to collect evidence that could be presented in international criminal courts. Speaking to the Human Rights Council on Monday, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, said that \u201cthe… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1568"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1569,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions\/1569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}