U.N. Rohingya Conference Must Spark Concrete Action

ROBERT KENNEDY HUMANRIGHT
Alexis Capati
Catherine Cooper
October 3, 2025

“You already have the evidence. You already have the power. What is missing is the political will.” Rohingya Activist Wai Wai Nu at the U.N. High-level Conference on Tuesday, September 30, 2025. 

 

As the Rohingya community faces compounding crises, this week’s U.N. High-level Conference on the Situation of Rohingya Muslims and Other Minorities in Myanmar was held at a critical moment. The Rohingya, who are one of the most persecuted communities in the world, face existential threats, including international crimes by the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army, an ethnic armed group. Outside of Myanmar, the Rohingya who live in refugee camps in Bangladesh face drastic cuts to essential aid.

The Rohingya are being forgotten at the UN

ARAB NEWS
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim
October 03, 20

The Rohingya are at risk of becoming a permanently forgotten people (File/AFP)

 

 The annual UN General Assembly has once again come and gone. World leaders delivered lofty speeches about war, climate change, and human rights. Yet among the most acute humanitarian tragedies of our time, the plight of the Rohingya, there was little more than symbolic mention. The genocide that forced nearly a million Rohingya into Bangladesh, and the continued persecution of those still in Myanmar, risks being relegated to the margins of global concern.

High-Level Conference Highlights Significant Challenges Facing Resolution of Rohingya Refugee Crisis

THE | DIPLOMAT
By Sebastian Strangio
October 02, 2025

 A safe and voluntary repatriation of refugees to Rakhine State remains unlikely for the foreseeable future. Is it time for a new approach?

Rohingya rights advocate Wai Wai Nu addresses the High-Level Conference on the Situation of Rohingya Muslims and Other Minorities at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Sept. 30, 2025. Credit: X/Wai Wai Nu

On Tuesday, top U.N. and government officials warned of the critical situation facing Rohingya Muslims and other minorities in Myanmar, due to funding shortfalls and the unstable political conditions inside Myanmar.

The High-Level Conference on the Situation of Rohingya Muslims and Other Minorities in Myanmar was convened at the United Nations General Assembly in New York to mobilize global support for Rohingya refugees and formulate a coordinated plan for the resolution of their return to Myanmar’s Rakhine State.

Rohingya Muslims plead for help at the UN to stop the killings in Myanmar

NEWS NATION
EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press 
Updated: Oct 1, 2025  

FILE – Rohingya refugees wait for food to be distributed during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan at their camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, March 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Shafiqur Rahman, File)

 

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Rohingya Muslims pleaded with the international community at the first United Nations high-level meeting on the plight of the ethnic minority to prevent the mass killings taking place in Myanmar and to help those in the persecuted group lead normal lives.

“This is a historic occasion for Myanmar, but this is long overdue,” Wai Wai Nu, the Rohingya founder and executive director of the Women’s Peace Network-Myanmar, told ministers and ambassadors from many of the U.N.’s 193-member nations in the General Assembly Hall.

“Night is dark for us”: Rohingya refugees need protection before repatriation

MNESTY INTERNATIONAL
30 September 2025

By Joe Freeman, Myanmar Researcher at Amnesty International, and Carolyn Nash, Asia Advocacy Director at Amnesty International USA

This story was originally published by The New Humanitarian

Thirteen-year-old Nasima is scared of the dark.

But the Rohingya girl’s fears are not imaginary.

For her, the monsters are real: criminal gangs that stalk her refugee camp at night.

“After 7pm, we turn off the light in fear of the robber,” she said. “At nighttime, we cannot go out, even to go to the toilet.”

“Night is dark for us.”

Missing From a U.N. Meeting on Helping Refugees? The Refugees.

The NewYork Times
By Verena Hölzl
Sept. 29, 2025,

World leaders will discuss how to assist the Rohingya in the world’s largest refugee settlement. But no one living there is attending the conference at the United Nations.

Rohingya refugees at a camp near Amtoli, Bangladesh, in 2017.Credit...Adam Dean for The New York Times

They live in the world’s largest collection of refugee camps, which they are rarely allowed to leave. Their shops there have been bulldozed and their schools closed. In their homeland, warring factions seem to agree only on a shared contempt for the stateless exiles.

The Rohingya know where home is

netranews
Greg Constantine, Mashruk Ahmad
September 23rd 2025 

A visual storyteller built a project which archives shreds of memory and identity of the Rohingya in one common space from across the world and generations; and tells the story about the life of a community rather than the destruction of it. 

Taza Mulluk was born in 1941. In 1961, he became a government employee at Burma Communication Service (BCS). He then became a postman. He retired as a postman and would receive a government pension. Included are ID cards from his employment at BCS and Burma Postal Service, his pension book and NRC card, a list of all the postmen in Arakan and a photo of Taza Mulluk retired with two other colleagues from the postal service. © Greg Constantine / Ek Khaale

Every month, Mashruk Ahmed will curate an instalment of a photo-story series that questions established power discourse, featuring photographers who explore gaps, absences, and silences in Bangladesh’s socio-political records.

CA off to New York to join UNGA

BSS NEWS

Date : 22 Sep 2025,

Chief Adviser Professor Muhammad Yunus and his entourage departed Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport for New York in the early hours of today to attend the 80th session of the UNGA. Photo: CA GoB Facebook

DHAKA, Sept 22, 2025 (BSS) - Chief Adviser Professor Muhammad Yunus left here for New York in the early hours of today to attend the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

Because no one asked: Archiving the Rohingya past

The Daily Star
By Naseef Faruque Amin
Sat Sep 6, 2025 

Visitors at Ek Khaale: Once Upon a Time, curated by Greg Constantine and organised by BRAC University’s Centre for Peace and Justice, engage with archival photographs that seek to reclaim the memory and dignity of the stateless Rohingyas. Courtesy: Greg Constantine 

It began with a question, the kind of question that arrives quietly, almost like a sigh. Greg Constantine, an American photojournalist and documentarian who has spent nearly two decades chronicling the plight of the Rohingya, sat inside a bamboo hut in Cox's Bazar, leaning towards the elderly men who were holding plastic bags filled with their pasts—brittle documents, photographs yellowed into sepia, certificates folded and refolded until the creases seemed older than the paper itself. He asked them, almost casually: Why have you never shown these to anyone else?

ASEAN must act now to ease Rohingya crisis

daily observer 
Saturday, 6 September, 2025 

The Asian Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) has once again sounded the alarm on the escalating crisis facing Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

At a press briefing held at the Dhaka Reporters Unity, following a meeting with Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus, APHR called on ASEAN to immediately establish a dedicated humanitarian fund to address the dire needs of over 1.3 million refugees stranded in Cox's Bazar.

UN Member States urged to pursue accountability for Rohingya genocide

Dhaka Tribune
UNB
Publish : 27 Aug 2025,

UNGA participants expected to discuss responses to ongoing abuses.

Rohingya refugees hold placards and flags to demand safe return to Myanmar as they mark the eighth anniversary of their mass exodus at their refugee camp at Kutupalong in Coxs Bazar district, Bangladesh on Aug 25, 2025. Photo: UNB

Fortify Rights and 57 other groups in a joint statement on Wednesday said United Nations member states must pursue accountability for genocide and other atrocities committed against ethnic Rohingya civilians in Rakhine State, Myanmar.

Stuck in grim camps, Rohingya hope Bangladesh can tackle crisis

prothomalo
AFP Dhaka
Published: 27 Aug 2025

Bangladesh is this week holding talks aimed at addressing the plight of Rohingya refugees, even as fresh arrivals cross over from war-ravaged Myanmar and shrinking aid flows deepen the crisis. 

An aerial view shows Rohingya refugees’ Balukhali camp in Ukhia on 26 August 2025. “Bangladesh now hosts 1.3 million forcibly displaced Rohingya from Myanmar,” Yunus told the aid conference in Cox’s Bazar, calling it the “largest refugee camp in the world”AFP

The rain was relentless the night Mohammad Kaisar fled for his life from his home in Myanmar’s Maungdaw township.

Myanmar: Situation Update with Paul Greening

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Luke Hunt
August 26, 2025

The junta plans its election while turmoil engulfs Thai politics. 

Credit: Luke Hunt

The junta in war-torn Myanmar has called elections with voting expected to begin on December 28 and continue well into January, which military chief Min Aung Hlaing hopes will legitimize his rule that began with a coup in early 2021.

Why the 2025 UN Conference Must Deliver on the Rohingya Crisis

THE | DIPLOMAT 
By Zulficar Niaz Tushar
July 02, 2025

Seven years on, the refugee camps are still full. Rohingya futures are still frozen. And the promises from the international community remain, for the most part, unfulfilled.

 

This September, the United Nations will host a long-awaited High-Level Conference on the Situation of Rohingya Muslims and Other Minorities in Myanmar. Set to take place in New York, it’s a moment that has been years in the making — proposed by Bangladesh’s chief adviser, Professor Muhammad Yunus, during the 79th U.N. General Assembly and now backed by 106 countries across continents. But behind the diplomacy and formality lies something far more urgent: the fate of over a million people who have been living in limbo for far too long.

Ata Ullah: Rohingya freedom fighter or war criminal?

Dhaka Tribune
John Quinley III
Publish : 16 May 2025,

Everyone should be held accountable for the atrocities they commit. Respect for international law is not optional, and true justice cannot be selective .

                                                                   

“The brutal military government has treated the Rohingya like animals -- that’s what we are fighting against,” Ata Ullah Abu Ammar Jununi, commander-in-chief of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), recalled the military’s genocidal attacks in 2016 and 2017.

Trump Administration Fires U.S. Aid Workers in Quake Zone in Myanmar

The New York Times
By Edward Wong and Hannah Beech
April 5, 2025

The move comes despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying the U.S. would still do some humanitarian work while shrinking foreign aid. Democratic lawmakers have denounced the cuts.

 

People lining up for donated relief supplies in Mandalay, Myanmar, on Thursday.Credit...Reuters

Trump administration officials have fired workers for the main American aid agency who were sent to Myanmar to assess how the United States could help with earthquake relief efforts, three people with knowledge of the actions said.

The firings, done Friday while the workers were in the rubble-strewn city of Mandalay, raise doubts about Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s stated commitment to continuing some humanitarian and crisis aid even as the aid organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development, is dismantled by the Trump administration.

Hope at a time of uncertainty

The Daily Star

Mokammel Shuvo

Sun Apr 6, 2025

 

Mixed reactions in Cox’s Bazar camps as Myanmar identifies 180,000 Rohingyas for return.

Following reports of Myanmar verifying 1,80,000 Rohingyas for potential repatriation, a wave of mixed feelings has washed over the camps in Cox's Bazar and Bhasan Char.

Although many Rohingyas express a strong desire to return to their homeland safely, they remain apprehensive of Myanmar's ability to guarantee security.

What militant’s arrest means for Rohingyas’ future

ARAB NEWS
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim
March 23, 2025 

Rohingya refugee carries a food ration sack on his back from a distribution center in Cox's Bazar. (AP)

The arrest by Bangladeshi police of Ataullah Abu Ammar Jununi, the leader of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, on the outskirts of Dhaka last week marks a significant turning point in the ongoing conflict in Myanmar. Ataullah’s capture raises critical questions about the future of Rohingya militancy, the shifting dynamics in Rakhine State and the prospects for stability in the region.

Rohingya genocide warrants and the legitimacy battle in Myanmar

new mandala
Tin Shine Aung
19 Mar, 2025 

AUNG SAN SUU KYI AT THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE, DECEMBER 2019 (PHOTO: ICJ)

The NUG’s handling of Aung San Suu Kyi’s reputation has become a critical fault line within its coalition, wedging former NLD members, ethnic organisations, and liberal-democratic groups within the political wing of the anti-junta resistance. 

On 13 February a federal court in Argentina issued arrest warrants for Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, head of Myanmar’s State Administration Council (SAC), and Aung San Suu Kyi, the former State Counsellor of the National League for Democracy (NLD)-led administration and the National Unity Government (NUG) and Nobel peace laureate. The warrants, issued under universal jurisdiction, accuse them of genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the Rohingya ethnic minority. (Universal jurisdiction allows states or international bodies to prosecute individuals for serious crimes like genocide and war crimes, regardless of where they occurred or even without a direct link through nationality.)

Insurgency in rohingya camps: AL govt downplayed the problem for years

The Daily Star
Staff Correspondent
Wed Mar 19, 2025

 Says Fortify Rights; blames Rohingya armed-groups for repeated violence there  

Despite the rising violence in the Rohingya camps of Cox's Bazar over the years, the Bangladesh authorities have repeatedly downplayed or denied the presence of Rohingya militant groups, allowing them to operate unchecked.

Refugees and rights groups have long raised concerns over killings, abductions, and torture carried out by armed factions, but official inaction has left vulnerable communities unprotected, said a report by Fortify Rights launched at Dhaka Reporters Unity yesterday.