theindepedent 15 March, 2019 “Statelessness is first and foremost a minority issue because more than
three quarters of the world’s official 10 million stateless people are
from minorities”
Millions around the world, including Rohingyas, are deprived of citizenship because they belong to specific minorities, UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues Fernand de Varennes has said.
Relocating Refugees to Unsafe Island Would Risk Lives, Livelihoods
Satellite image time series of Bhasan Char camp development (October 2017 – March 2018).
Bangladesh authorities say they will soon start relocating over 100,000 Rohingya refugees to Bhasan Char, a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal. Officials said this is necessary to reduce pressure on the world’s largest refugee settlement in Cox’s Bazar, where nearly 1.2 million Rohingya have fled to escape military atrocities in Myanmar.
Bhasan Char is a spit of land made of accumulated silt. Officials say the island has been secured with embankments, and the homes and cyclone shelters are better than anything available to millions of Bangladeshis. But they have yet to provide convincing assurances that the refugees will be safe there, and their freedom of movement and right to livelihood protected.
The government brought some diplomats and other foreign officials to see the infrastructure on the island. But Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur on Myanmar, who visited in January, noted, “There are a number of things that remain unknown to me even following my visit, chief among them being whether the island is truly habitable.”
Residents from nearby Hatiya Island say it is not. “Part of the island is eroded by the monsoon every year,” one man told Human Rights Watch. “In that time, we never dare go to that island, so how will thousands of Rohingya live there?”
Humanitarian aid groups are concerned about refugee health and safety in the Cox’s Bazar settlement, but isolating them on Bhasan Char, with likely limited access to education and health services, could be even more problematic. Although Bangladeshi authorities say there will be no forced relocations, there is little evidence that any of the refugees would be willing to move there. “Bhashan Char will be like a prison,” one local journalist said.
Dumping a battered and traumatized people on Bhasan Char to face yet another threat to their survival is not a solution. Bangladesh should terminate the relocation plans unless or until independent experts determine that the island is suitable, and until the government ensures that refugees who consent to relocate there will be allowed freedom of movement on and off the island.
Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, the government of Myanmar denies their armed forces raped Rohingya women and girls in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that forced more than 740,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee the country since late 2017.
Myanmar’s government under Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has used repressive laws to prosecute peaceful critics, dashing hopes that its first democratic leader in decades would safeguard free speech, Human Rights Watch said on Friday.
India's Hindu nationalist government's crackdown on 40,000 Rohingya forces them to try to cross over to Bangladesh. by Faisal Mahmud
23rd January 2019,
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Dhaka/Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh - Last October, Zakir Hossain was getting a haircut at a saloon in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad when the TV inside the shop flashed a report on India deporting seven Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar.
Myanmar has refused a U.N. human rights expert entry as she visits Thailand and Bangladesh investigating abuses being committed in the country.
Myanmar has barred Yanghee Lee, the U.N. special rapporteur to Myanmar, from their country since December 2017. Lee has said she still seeks to engage with the Myanmar government and that she remains committed to her mandate of monitoring the human rights situation in the country.
Aerial view of a burned Rohingya village near Maungdaw, north of Rakhine State, Myanmar on September 27, 2017 Reuters file photo
UN bodies, international rights organizations, NGOs, and Rohingya diasporas, talk to the Dhaka Tribune regarding the ongoing crisis and possible solution
One year has passed but still no headway has been made in solving the ongoing Rohingya crisis.
The UN estimates 200,000 Rohingya are at risk of floods and landslides [Sorin Furcoi/Al Jazeera]
Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh - Rohingya refugees living in a severely overcrowded mega camp should be relocated by the Bangladeshi government to safer areas, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Monday.
