UN Shows Conflicting Approaches to Myanmar Crisis

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
John Sifton
Asia Advocacy Director
April 4, 2024 

The United Nations Security Council’s first open meeting on Myanmar since 2019, New York, April 4, 2024. © 2024 John Sifton/Human Rights Watch

Myanmar’s already abysmal human rights situation is getting worse.

That’s what senior United Nations officials told the UN Security Council on April 4, during a rare open meeting on Myanmar, its first since February 2019.

The council heard of a spiraling human rights and humanitarian catastrophe, with particularly worrisome abuses in Rakhine State. Conflict has “weakened transnational security” and instability has led to a crisis with “global implications,” officials said.

Bangladesh arrests members of Rohingya insurgent group after refugee leader’s murder

South China Morning Post
dpa
Published: 3 Oct, 2021

• Mohib Ullah, who was killed on Wednesday, had met former US president Donald Trump and joined a UN Human Rights Council session in 2019
• Three suspects with links to an armed insurgent group were detained and are being interrogated, officials said.

Bangladesh police officials stand guard near the crime scene after the Mohib Ullah a top Rohingya community leader, was shot dead in Cox’s Bazaar. Photo: EPA-EFE

Police inBangladesh arrested three suspects believed to have links to an armed insurgent group among Rohingya refugees, as officials promised justice for the killers of a prominent Rohingya rights activist.

“The killers will certainly be brought to justice. None will be spared,” Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen said on Saturday, three days after the murder of Mohib Ullah, the head of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH).

Another Rohingya man detained over Mohib Ullah killing

bdnews24.com
Cox’s Bazar Correspondent,
Published: 03 Oct 2021

Mohib Ullah, a Rohingya Muslim leader from the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, poses for a potrait at his office in Kutupalong refugee camp in Ukhiya, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, April 19, 2018. Picture taken April 19, 2018. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain

The Armed Police Battalion (APBn) has detained another Rohingya man in connection with the killing of Rohingya community leader Mohammad Mohib Ullah in Cox’s Bazar’s Ukhiya.

Thirty-five-year-old Mohammad Ilias was taken into custody around noon on Sunday, said APBn Captain and Superintendent of Police Mohammad Naimul Haq.

The detainee will be questioned, he said.

Law enforcers have detained a total of five suspects over Mohib Ullah’s death.

A group of unidentified gunmen killed the 48-year-old Mohib Ullah at a refugee camp in Cox's Bazar's Ukhiya on Sept 30.

Rohingya Woman Files First Complaint in Myanmar HRC After 'Genocide'

Reuters

12/Dec/2020

 

The woman has sought $ 2 million in compensation for the death of her husband, who was killed by government soldiers during a 2017 military crackdown in western Myanmar. 

File Photo: Rohingya refugees stretch their hands to receive aid distributed by local organisations at Balukhali makeshift refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, September 14, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Danish Siddiqui/File Photo

A Rohingya woman is seeking $2 million in compensation for the death of her husband, who was killed by government soldiers during a 2017 military crackdown in western Myanmar, lawyers said.

Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) and an international law firm, McDermott Will & Emery, said they filed a complaint on Thursday with Myanmar’s human rights commission on behalf of Setara Begum, whose husband Shoket Ullah was killed at Inn Din village in Rakhine state.

Her claim is the first complaint related to the Rohingya known to have been filed through Myanmar’s human rights commission, according to LAW, a legal non-profit organisation based in Geneva.

Q&A: The Gambia v. Myanmar, Rohingya Genocide at The International Court of Justice, May 2020 Factsheet

Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect and the Global Justice Center

21 May 2020

Policy Brief

 

On 11 November 2019, the Republic of The Gambia filed suit against the Republic of the Union of Myanmar in the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) for violating the Genocide Convention. Two months later and at the request of The Gambia, the ICJ ordered the government of Myanmar to take certain actions to protect the Rohingya via “provisional measures” while the case proceeds. This historic lawsuit brings a critical focus to Myanmar’s responsibility as a state for the Rohingya genocide.

The Gambia’s case focuses on the actions of Myanmar’s security forces, starting in October 2016 and then again in August 2017, where they engaged in so-called “clearance operations” against the Rohingya, a distinct Muslim ethnic minority, in Rakhine State. The operations, in particular those that started in August 2017, were characterized by brutal violence and serious human rights violations on a mass scale. Survivors report indiscriminate killings, rape and sexual violence, arbitrary detention, torture, beatings, and forced displacement. As a result, an estimated 745,000 people – mostly ethnic Rohingya – were forced to flee to Bangladesh. The “clearance operations” followed decades of institutionalized discrimination and systematic persecution of the Rohingya, including the passage of laws that stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship, restricted their religious freedoms, as well as reproductive and marital rights.

Genocide threat for Myanmar’s Rohingya greater than ever, investigators warn Human Rights Council

UN News
16 September 2019
Human Rights

IOM/Mohammed

Rohingya refugees fleeing conflict and persecution in Myanmar.

 

Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya who remain in Myanmar may face a greater threat of genocide than ever, amid Government attempts to “erase their identity and remove them from the country”, UN-appointed independent investigators said on Monday.

 

In a report detailing alleged violations in Myanmar over the last year, the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission, insists that many of the conditions that led to “killings, rapes and gang rapes, torture, forced displacement and other grave rights violations” by the country’s military, that prompted some 700,000 Rohingya to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh in 2017, are still present.