The Rohingya's Quest for International Justice

THE WIRE
ANAYLIS

Saumya Uma
30/AUG/2021

This is the third in a series of articles on the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Rome Statute creating the ICC entered into force on July 1, 2002 and the court is now in its 20th year. To mark the occasion, The Wire is publishing a series of articles evaluating its performance over the past two decades. Read the first part here and the second part here.

The situation faced by the Rohingya is once again in the spotlight with the Bangladesh government reportedly commencing the COVID vaccination drive for Rohingya refugees on one hand and the Indian government terming them “a threat to national security” on the other. Last month, the Human Rights Watch minced no words in asking the Indian government to release the detained asylum seekers.

Rohingya woman recounts abuse by Myanmar junta in court

DAILY SABAH
ANADOLU AGENCY
DHAKA ASIA PACIFIC
AUG 19, 2021

A young Rohingya refugee boy stands outside a tent at a refugee camp alongside the banks of the Yamuna River in the southeastern borders of New Delhi, India, July 1, 2021. (AP Photo)

Testifying before a court in Argentina a Rohingya woman described the Myanmar military's genocide, painting a startling picture of the abuse suffered in Rakhine state, a rights body for the minority confirmed Wednesday.

The eyewitness, whose identity has been withheld for security reasons, is one of six Rohingya women treated inhumanely by the Myanmar military in their home country and are now living in cramped Bangladeshi camps. She virtually narrated her ordeal on Tuesday at the Federal Criminal Appeals Court in Buenos Aires, the Argentinian capital.

The Rohingya genocide has been separated into two phases, the first of which was a military campaign from October 2016 to January 2017, and the second of which has been ongoing since August 2017.

Rohingya women testify in Argentina court on ‘brutal massacre in Rakhine state’

The Daily Star
Wed Aug 18, 2021

Rohingya refugee girls are seen at Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh. Photo: Anisur Rahman/ Star file

In a historic development, Rohingya women have described how the Myanmar military carried out a brutal massacre in their village, in an Argentinean court of law, under the aegis of universal jurisdiction.

Speaking remotely to the Federal Criminal Appeals Court in Buenos Aires from Cox's Bazar on Tuesday, the women told how soldiers killed their husbands in Chuk Pyin, Rakhine, Myanmar, according to a statement from the Burmese Rohingya Organization UK (BROUK).

Argentine Court: Rohingyas testify about the horrors they faced

The Daily Star
Diplomatic Correspondent
Thu Aug 19, 2021 

In a historic development for Myanmar, Rohingya women have described in an Argentine court of law, under the aegis of universal jurisdiction, how the Myanmar military carried out a brutal massacre in their village.

Speaking remotely to the Federal Criminal Appeals Court in Bueno Aires from the world's largest refugee camp in Cox's Bazar on Tuesday, the women spoke of how soldiers killed their husbands in Chuk Pyin of Myanmar's Rakhine, according to a statement from the Burmese Rohingya Organization UK (BROUK).

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They said soldiers killed hundreds of people, while some women were raped before being killed. The soldiers went on to rape many other women in their village and then burned their homes to the ground.

Rohingya to give first testimony in push for Myanmar army probe

THE STRAITS TIMES
17 August 2021

A photo from Sept 10, 2017, showing a Rohingya refugee pulling a child as they walk to the shore in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh.PHOTO: REUTERS

YANGON (AFP) - Rohingya refugees expelled from Myanmar in a bloody crackdown are to testify in court for the first time on Tuesday (Aug 17) to urge a full judicial investigation into allegations of war crimes committed against them.

A military campaign in Myanmar in 2017 is believed to have killed thousands and forced some 750,000 members of the Muslim minority group to flee to refugee camps in Bangladesh, bringing accounts of rape, murder and arson.

The witnesses will testify remotely to a court in Argentina, which is considering invoking the principle of "universal jurisdiction" to bring a case against Myanmar's leaders for genocide and crimes against humanity. The legal premise holds that some acts - including war crimes and crimes against humanity - are so horrific they are not specific to one nation and can be tried anywhere.

အာဂျင်တီးနားတရားရုံး ကြားနာပွဲ ရိုဟင်ဂျာ လူမျိုးတုန်း သတ်ဖြတ်မှုမှ လွတ်မြောက်လာသူတွေ ထွက်ဆိုမည်

VOA
ဗွီအိုအေမြန်မာပိုင်း
အင်ကြင်းနိုင်
17 သြဂုတ်၊ 2021

အွန်လိုင်းကနေ ကြားနာမယ့် အမှုမှာ ဘာတွေ စိန်ခေါ်မှု အခက်အခဲတွေရှိနေလဲ၊ ဘယ်လို အကျိုးထိရောက် မှု တွေရှိမလဲ စတာတွေ နဲ့ ပတ်သက်လို့ အမှုဖွင့်ထားတဲ့ ဗြိတိန်အခြေစိုက် မြန်မာ ရိုဟင်ဂျာများအဖွဲ့ ဥက္ကဌ ဦး ထွန်းခင်ကို မအင်ကြင်းနိုင်က စကိုက်ကနေ ဆက်သွယ်မေးမြန်းထားပါတယ်။

 

Link : Here

Outcry over Myanmar junta denying Covid jabs to Rohingya

UCA NEWS

UCA News reporter
August 13, 2021

Diaspora group says deliberately withholding essential health care to Rohingya confirms genocidal charges.

Members of the internally displaced Rohingya community at a camp in Rakhine state. (Photo: AFP) 

 

A diaspora group based in London has decried the Myanmar junta’s plans to withhold Covid-19 vaccinations from hundreds of thousands of Rohingya inside crowded camps in Rakhine state.

“This is a continuation and escalation of the crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing, that have been carried out for decades against Rohingya people,” Tun Khin, president of the Burmese Rohingya Organization UK (BROUK), said in a statement on Aug. 12.

New sanctions against Myanmar military a welcome move

NEW

STRAITSTIMES

June 23, 2021

Makeshift barriers erected by the military and sand bags are seen in front of a government sub-district office along a road in Mandalay, as the country remains in turmoil after the February military coup. (Photo by STR / AFP)

LETTERS: The Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK) welcomes new sanctions announced by the EU and the UK on June 21st, targeting more financial interests of the Myanmar military as well as individuals with links to the military dictatorship.

It is of outmost importance that the international community keeps the pressure on the Myanmar military.

Rohingya, as genocide survivors, stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Myanmar protesting the illegal military regime, and the international community must do all they can to support Myanmar's struggle for true federal democracy.

NUG ရဲ့ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာအဖြဲ႕ႀကိဳဆို

 B B C

ဘီဘီစီၿမန္မာပိုင္း
03 ဇြန္လ2021

 

 အမ်ိဳးသားညီညြတ္ေရးအစိုးရ က ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာျပည္သူမ်ားဆိုင္ရာ မူဝါဒ သေဘာထားကို ထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္ပါတယ္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုေတြေနထိုင္ၾကသူေတြဟာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကို အျပည့္အဝ ခံစားခြင့္ရွိေစရမယ္ ဆိုတာအပါ အ ဝင္ လူမ်ိဳးအလိုက္ခံစားခြင့္ နိုင္ငံသားအခြင့္အေရးခံစားခြင့္စတာေတြေပၚမွာ ဒီမူဝါဒကို အေျခခံထားတယ္လို႔ အန္ယူဂ်ီက ပထမဆုံးအႀကိမ္ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္တဲ့ မူဝါဒ ေၾကညာခ်က္ထဲမွာ ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။

၁၉၈၂ နိုင္ငံသားျဖစ္မႈဥပေဒျပင္ဆင္တာ၊ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ အသစ္ျပန္လုပ္တာ ကို ဖြဲ႕စည္းပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒ ေရးဆြဲ ၿပီး တဲ့ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွာ လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားမယ္လို႔ ဆိုသလို ၂၀၁၇ ကိုဖီအာနန္အႀကံျပဳခ်က္ ၈၈ ခ်က္ကလည္း ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ အေရးေျဖရွင္းရာမွာ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ အခန္းက႑က ပါဝင္သြားမယ္လို႔ လည္း ဆိုပါတယ္

အမ်ိဳးသားညီညြတ္ေရးအစိုးရရဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာျပည္သူေတြအေပၚ မူဝါဒနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ လူမ်ိဳးစု အသိုင္း အဝိုင္းကေကာ ဘယ္လို သေဘာထားၾကပါလဲ။ ျမန္မာရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ အသင္း (UK)ရဲ့ ဥကၠဌ ဉီးထြန္းခင္ကို ကိုရင္ ေမာင္က ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းထားပါတယ္။ 

Link : Here

ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာအေရး - အမ်ိဳးသားညီညြတ္ေရးအစိုးရရဲ့ မူဝါဒ အ ေပၚ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြ ဘယ္လိုျမင္လဲ

 B B C

ဘီဘီစီျမန္မာပိုင္း
03 June 2021

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္နိုင္ငံ ကူတူပေလာင္ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းက ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္အခ်ိဳ႕

အမ်ိဳးသားညီညြတ္ေရးအစိုးရ NUG က ဇြန္လ ၃ ရက္ေန႔မွာ "ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ျပည္သူမ်ား ဆိုင္ရာ မူဝါဒ သေဘာ ထား"ကို ထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္ၿပီးတဲ့ေနာက္ ဒီမူဝါဒေတြထဲမွာ လိုလား အားတက္စရာ ေကာင္းမြန္တဲ့အခ်က္ေတြ ပါ တဲ့အတြက္ ႀကိဳဆိုတယ္၊ တခ်ိဳ႕အပိုင္း ေတြမွာေတာ့ ျဖည့္စြက္စဥ္းစားေစလိုတယ္လို႔ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ အသိုင္းအဝိုင္း က ေျပာပါတယ္။

"ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာအပါအဝင္ လူနည္းစုေတြနဲ႔ (NUG က) ပူးေပါင္းလုပ္ေဆာင္မယ္ဆိုတာကို ေတြ႕ရတဲ့အတြက္ ဒါက အေတာ္ႀကိဳဆိုစရာ ျဖစ္တယ္၊ အၾကမ္းဖက္ခံခဲ့ရတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြကို ကိုယ္ခ်င္းစာနာလာတာ၊ တရားမၽွ တမႈ အတြက္ က်ဴးလြန္သူေတြကို အျပစ္ေပးနိုင္ေအာင္လုပ္မယ္၊ ေနာက္ၿပီး ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္ေတြ ေဘးကင္းစြာ ျပန္လာနိုင္ေအာင္ လုပ္ေဆာင္မယ္ စတဲ့ အခ်က္ေတြဟာလည္း သိပ္ေကာင္းပါ တယ္"လို႔ ျမန္မာရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ အသင္း (ယူေက) ရဲ့ ဥကၠဌ ဦးထြန္းခင္က ဘီဘီစီကို ေျပာပါတယ္။

Genocide of Rohingya shows no sign of abating: Report

THE NATION
Anadolu

May 29, 2021

A UK-based Rohingya rights defender, the Burmese Rohingya Organization UK (BROUK), in a new report claimed “the genocide against Rohingya shows no sign of abating in Myanmar” despite the order of the UN's highest court to the Myanmar authorities for protecting the minority community.

“Since the start of 2021, at least 15 Rohingya -- including nine infants and young children -- have died as a direct result of onerous and illegal travel restrictions preventing access to medical care,” the report released on Monday said.

The release has also coincided with Myanmar’s duty to report to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), on how it is preventing genocidal acts against the minority Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State.

Genocide against Rohingyas not abating

The Daily Star

Diplomatic Correspondent
May 25, 2021

Says BROUK; junta leader cast doubt on return of refugees

The genocide against the Rohingyas shows no sign of abating in Myanmar, the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK) said in a new briefing yesterday.

It said the Myanmar military continues to subject the Rohingyas to a vicious pattern of abuse and extortion in the Rakhine State, where Rohingyas are kept in what amounts to an open-air prison, creating intolerable living conditions.

Since the start of this year, at least 15 Rohingya, including nine infants and young children, have died as a direct result of onerous and illegal travel restrictions preventing access to medical care, said BROUK President Tun Khin in a statement.

Pan-Southeast Asian Agreement Aims to Stop Spillover of Myanmar Violence

VOA

By Ralph Jennings
April 24, 2021

President Joko Widodo, center, accompanied by other Indonesian officials, delivers a press statement following a meeting of ASEAN leaders at the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, Indonesia, April 24, 2021. (Courtesy Indonesian Presidential Palace)

TAIPEI - Saturday's strongly worded call from a bloc of 10 Southeast Asian nations for an end to post-coup violence in Myanmar moves the region a step away from unrest infecting other countries and a step toward peacemaking, analysts say.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) issued a five-point consensus calling for “immediate cessation” of violence in Myanmar, “utmost restraint” by all actors there and the start of peace talks. An ASEAN envoy will help mediate dialogue in Myanmar, the consensus said, and the group will offer humanitarian aid. Myanmar is a group member.

ျမန္မာ့အေရး ကုလလုံျခဳံေရးေကာင္စီကို မေစာင့္ဘဲ ‘ယခုပဲ အေရးယူေဆာင္ရြက္သြားရန္’ နိုင္ငံတကာမွ ကၽြမ္းက်င္သူ မ်ား တိုက္တြန္

Mizimma

05 April 2021

ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံတ၀န္းရွိ ျပည္သူမ်ားက ေန႔စဥ္ေန႔တိုင္း ျပသထားခဲ့သည့္ ဦးေဆာင္မႈႏွင့္ စိတ္ပိုင္းျဖတ္လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနမႈတို႔ေၾကာင့္ အဆင့္လယ္ဗယ္တိုင္းရွိ နိုင္ငံတကာအသိုင္းအဝိုင္းအေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာ့အေရးအေပၚ ထိေရာက္သည့္ အေရးယူေဆာင္ရြက္မႈ လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားေစေရးအတြက္ စိတ္ပါ၀င္စားမႈ ရွိသင့္ေနၿပီျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ကုလသမဂၢ၏ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆိုင္ရာ အထူးစုံစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရးမႉး တြန္ အန္ဒ႐ူးစ္က ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ရက္ပိုင္းက ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့သည့္ အြန္လိုင္းစကားဝိုင္းေဆြး‌ေႏြးပြဲ (webinar) တစ္ခုတြင္ ေျပာသြားခဲ့သည္။

More than 100 UK MPs want intervention in The Gambia’s Rohingya genocide case

The Daily Star 

Star Online Report
December 18, 2020

 

Photo: AFP/File 

More than 100 UK MPs have called on the British government to make an intervention supporting The Gambia's Rohingya genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), as human rights violations against the Rohingyas continue.

"Ending impunity is essential not only to ensure justice and uphold international law, but also to deter further international crimes by the military in Myanmar," according to a letter to the UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Dominic Raab MP, issued on December 17.

Myanmar ignoring Rohingya genocide trial measures, say activists

Eastern Eyes

November 26, 2020

The President of The Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK), Tun Khin, poses in front of Argentine federal court in Buenos Aires on November 13, 2019. (Photo by JUAN MABROMATA / AFP)

Human rights lawyers and activists said on Monday (23) that Myanmar is continuing to commit genocide against Rohingya Muslims in breach of orders by the UN’s top court.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January rejected arguments made personally by Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi in The Hague and imposed urgent interim measures on the predominantly Buddhist nation.

Rohingya frustrated over polarized elections in Myanmar

AA

Md. Kamruzzaman

DHAKA, Bangladesh
08.11.2020

More than 1M Rohingya in Bangladesh, over half million in Myanmar have been excluded from voting in Sunday's polls

Living in squalid makeshift tents in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, more than one million Rohingya have been disenfranchised in the Sunday’s general elections in Myanmar, rising frustration among the persecuted people.

“According to international law, voting right is a fundamental right, but we are being denied by the government of Myanmar. We are citizens of Myanmar. So we must deserve the right of voting,” Khin Maung, a Rohingya youth in Bangladesh’s camps, told Anadolu Agency.

ရခိုင္မွာ တပ္မေတာ္က ေသြးခြဲဝါဒျဖန္႔ေၾကာင္း ႐ုိဟင္ဂ်ာ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းေတြ စြပ္စြဲ

VOA
ဗြီအိုေအ (ျမန္မာပုိင္း)
01 ႏိုဝင္ဘာ၊ 2020

ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္ ေမာင္ေတာၿမိဳ႕နယ္မွာ လုံၿခဳံေရးယူေနတဲ့ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္သားအခ်ဳိ႕။ (ေအာက္တုိဘာ ၂၁၊ ၂၀၁၆)
 

ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္တြင္းနဲ႔ အြန္လိုင္းမွာပါ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္က ဝါဒျဖန္႔စစ္ပြဲ လုပ္လာတဲ့အေပၚ စိုးရိမ္မႈ ပုိတိုးလာ ရေၾကာင္း ႐ုိဟင္ဂ်ာအဖြဲ႔အစည္း ၂၉ ဖြဲ႔က ေအာက္တုိဘာ ၃၁ ရက္ေန႔မွာ စုေပါင္းထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္တဲ့ ေၾကညာ ခ်က္မွာ ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။

Myanmar Army Says it Has Convicted Three Troops For 2017 Massacre of Rohingya

RADIO FREE ASIA
2020-06-30

Rohingya Muslim refugee Mohammad Younus from the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin in Rakhine state, stands on a hill at the Kutupalong refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh, Jan. 14, 2018.
Associated Press

Myanmar’s military said Tuesday that it tried and convicted three soldiers in a secret court-martial for the massacre of hundreds of Rohingya villagers during an army-led crackdown in Rakhine state in 2017, only the second case in which troops have been held accountable for atrocities against the Muslim minority.

The verdict on the massacre near Gu Dar Pyin village came as the Myanmar military faces genocide-related charges at three international courts over its expulsion of more than 740,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh in late 2017, in which thousands died in indiscriminate killings, mass rape, torture, and village burnings.

Myanmar Avoids Helping Rohingya Minority Despite International Court Order, Observers say

VOA NEWS
By Ralph Jennings
June 06, 2020

A Rohingya refugee sits with a child at the Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, June 2, 2020.

TAIPEI, TAIWAN - Myanmar has sidelined an international court order to improve conditions for its long-embattled Rohingya minority, despite fears that the Southeast Asian government is trying to commit genocide against the group, observers say.

The U.N.’s International Court of Justice in January ordered Myanmar to "take all measures within its power" to prevent any acts of genocide against ethnic Rohingya Muslims, who fled the country amid a bloody military crackdown in 2017. The ICJ ordered Myanmar to submit a report within four months on what actions it is taking to comply with the court's decision, and to submit follow-up reports every six months after that.