The UN’s refugee data shame, and what needs to be done

The Citizen
Oped

By ZARA RAHMAN
THURSDAY JUNE 24 2021

A Rohingya refugee holds ID cards, in Shamlapur refugee camp, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh on 25 March, 2018. PHOTO | FILE

I saw this coming, and I wish I had been wrong.

Back in 2017, I wrote of the risks of the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, collecting biometric registration data from Rohingya refugees, noting that the data could be used to drive unwilling repatriation; that collecting such data may make refugees believe their access to aid depends upon providing such data; and that – once collected or shared – such biometric data is virtually impossible to get rid of.

Nearly four years later, a report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) says these worst-case scenarios have come true: A detailed database of the Rohingya refugee population has been handed over to Myanmar’s government, which drove them across the border into Bangladesh almost four years ago. The same millitary that conducted the (most recent) genocide against the Rohingya now holds the biometric data of the population it has tried to eradicate.

Rohingya on Bangladesh island feel trapped, fear monsoons: HRW

ALJAZEERA

7 Jun 2021

Human Rights Watch interviews 167 refugees and says they were moved ‘without full, informed consent’ and prevented from returning to the mainland.

Rohingya refugees are seen at the housing complex of Bhasan Char island after they were relocated [File: Mohammad Al-Masum Molla/AFP]

Rohingya refugees moved to a Bangladesh island fear they will be exposed to terrible conditions during the upcoming monsoon season, and are struggling with “inadequate” health and education facilities, a Human Rights Watch report said.

About 18,800 refugees have been moved from the Cox’s Bazar region – where approximately 850,000 people live in squalid and cramped conditions after fleeing Myanmar – to the low-lying silt island of Bhasan Char in the Bay of Bengal.

UN General Assembly Action Needed on Myanmar

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

Widad Franco
UN Coordinator
@widadfranco

Demonstrators pose with a banner showing the symbolic three-finger salute and names of those killed during protests since the military coup, Yangon, Myanmar on April 11, 2021. © 2021 AP Photo

The United Nations Security Council, entrusted by the UN Charter to be the world’s guardian of international peace and security, has done little to help the people of Myanmar besides issuing statements asking the junta to end the violence and release prisoners. But the UN General Assembly can help motivate the council take action to stem the rampant abuses.

In the absence of robust Security Council action, the 193-nation General Assembly should adopt a resolution condemning the junta’s rights violations and calling on all UN members to halt arms transfers to Myanmar. While not legally binding on states, such a resolution would carry significant political weight. As the UN’s most representative body, it would send a powerful signal to the junta and press members of the Security Council to adopt a legally binding resolution – as recently urged by a group of 205 nongovernmental organizations, including Human Rights Watch.

Bangladesh: Rohinyga Refugees Allegedly Tortured

 

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

News Release
April 27, 2021

Investigate Security Force Beatings for Attempting to Flee Bhasan Char Island

Rohingya refugees headed to the Bhasan Char island prepare to board navy vessels from the south eastern port city of Chattogram, Bangladesh on Feb.15, 2021. © 2021 AP Photo

(New York) – Bangladesh authorities should immediately investigate allegations that security forces beat and arbitrarily detained Rohingya refugees who tried to leave Bhasan Char island, Human Rights Watch said today. The Bangladesh government has relocated nearly 20,000 Rohingya refugees to the remote island without consulting international experts to ensure their safety or determining their humanitarian needs.

Bangladesh security forces on April 6, 2021 arrested and beat at least 12 refugees who were caught trying to leave the island, restricting their freedom of movement. The authorities have not informed family members of their whereabouts. On April 12, a Bangladesh sailor allegedly beat four children with a PVC pipe for leaving their quarters to play with refugee children in another area. The authorities should immediately release any refugees who are arbitrarily detained, and hold to account those responsible for abuses.

လူ႔အခြင္႔အေရးအေျခအေန တိုးတက္ေအာင္လုပ္ဖို႔ NLD ကို HRW တိုက္တြန္း

VOA
ဗြီအိုုေအ (ျမန္မာဌာန)
၀င္းမင္း
14 ဇန္နဝါရီ၊ 2021

 

NLD ပါတီ႐ံုးခ်ဳပ္ေရွ႕တြင္ ေအာင္ပြဲခံေနသည့္ ေထာက္ခံသူမ်ား။ (၉ ႏိုဝင္ဘာ ၂၀၂၀)

NLD အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ အစိုးရအေနနဲ႔႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြႀကီးႀကီးမားမား အႏိုင္ရထားတဲ့အခြင့္ အ လမ္း ကိုအသံုးျပဳၿပီး၊ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအေျခအေန ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ တိုးတက္ေကာင္းမြန္လာေအာင္ လုပ္သင့္ ၿပီလို႔၊ HRW ႏိုင္ငံတကာလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအဖဲြ႕ႀကီးက ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကိုဖိႏွိပ္တဲ့ဥပေဒေတြကို ျပင္ဆင္၊ဖ်က္သိမ္းဖို႔နဲ႔ လက္ေတြ႔ ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မူေတြ ဆက္မျဖစ္ေစဖို႔ လုပ္စရာ အမ်ားႀကီးက်န္ေနေသးတယ္လို႔လည္း HRW က ေျပာပါတယ္။

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ရွိ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ထိန္းသိမ္းေရးစခန္းမ်ား ဖ်က္ သိမ္းရန္ HRW ေတာင္းဆို

မဇၩိမ
Friday, October 09, 2020

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ ေက်ာက္ျဖဴရွိ ေက်ာက္တစ္လုံးစခန္းတြင္ မြတ္ဆလင္အမ်ိဳးသမီးတစ္ဦး သူ၏တဲတြင္ ထမင္းခ်က္ေနသည္ကို ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၃ ရက္၊ ၂၀၁၉ ခုႏွစ္က ရိုက္ကူးထားခဲ့ေသာ ဓါတ္ပုံျဖစ္သည္။ (ဓါတ္ပုံ- ေအအက္ဖ္ပီ)

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္တြင္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ၁၃၀,၀၀၀ ခန႔္ကို ထိန္းသိမ္းထားရွိသည့္ ေနခ်င္စဖြယ္မေကာင္းေသာ ခိုလႈံေရး စခန္းမ်ားကို ႐ုတ္သိမ္းသင့္ေၾကာင္း လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ (HRW) က ေတာင္းဆို လိုက္ သည္။

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္တြင္ နယ္ေျမရွင္းလင္းေရးမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ကစၿပီး ေနရပ္စြန႔္ခြာကာ ထိန္းသိမ္းေရး စ ခန္း တြင္ ပိတ္မိေနသည့္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ႏွင့္ ကမန္မြတ္စလင္ ေထာင္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာရွိေနသည္ဟု HRW ၏ ေအာက္တိုဘာလ ၇ ရက္ေန႔က ထုတ္ျပန္သည့္ စာမ်က္ႏွာ ၁၆၉ မ်က္ႏွာပါ အစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ ေဖာ္ျပထား သည္။

လူအခြင့္အေရးအဖြဲ႕ HRW နဲ႔ ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းျခင္း

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အာရွအသံ ( RFA )

ျမန္မာဌာန | သတင္းမ်ား
မိုးျမင့္
2020-10-10

နယူးေယာက္ အေျခစိုက္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ HRW က ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၉ ရက္ေန႔က ထုတ္ ၿပန္တဲ့ စာမ်က္ႏွာ ၁၆၉ မ်က္ႏွာရွိတဲ့ အစီရင္ခံစာမွာ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္က ဒုကၡသည္စခန္း၂၄ ခုမွာ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ၁၃၀၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ဟာ အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္က်ခံရသလို ျဖစ္ေနတာ ရွစ္ႏွစ္ၾကာၿပီလို႔ ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြ ရဲ့ ေနထိုင္ဖို႔ မသင့္ေလ်ာ္တဲ့ စခန္းေတြရဲ့ အေျခအေန၊ အစိုးရရဲ့ စီမံခန႔္ခြဲေပးမႈ၊ အကူအညီအေပးေရး အဖြဲ႕ေတြ ရင္ဆိုင္ေနရပုံ၊ ေနရပ္ရင္းမွာ ျပန္လည္ေနထိုင္ခြင့္ စတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းအရာေတြနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ႏွစ္ႏွစ္ အတြင္း ဒုကၡသည္ ၆၀ ေက်ာ္ရဲ့ ေျပာဆိုခ်က္အေပၚ အေျခခံ ျပဳစုထားတဲ့ အစီရင္ခံစာလို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။

“An Open Prison without End” Myanmar’s Mass Detention of Rohingya in Rakhine State

Rohingya living in ‘open prison’ in Myanmar: Human Rights Watch

Aljazeera

8 Oct 2020

Report says about 130,000 Rohingya live under ‘squalid and abusive’ conditions and calls for an end to their ‘arbitrary detention’. 

Rohingya refugees gather near the fence at the 'no man's land' zone in Maungdaw district in Myanmar's Rakhine State in 2018 [File: Nyein Chan Naing/EPA]

 

Approximately 130,000 Rohingya Muslims who remain in refugee camps in Myanmar’s conflict-torn Rakhine state live under “squalid and abusive” conditions, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Thursday urging that their “arbitrary and indefinite” detention be ended immediately.

Rohingya Trapped by 'Apartheid' Regime in Myanmar, Says Human Rights Watch

VICE

by Anthony Esguerra

08 October 2020

 

More than 130,000 Rohingya Muslims have been in internment camps for eight years in Rakhine State. 

Rohingya people who were arrested at sea in December walk on a beach after being transported by Myanmar authorities to Rakhine state on Jan. 13, 2020. 173 Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar were arrested at sea in December by Myanmar's navy and were escorted back to Rakhine state on Jan. 13, authorities said. PHOTO: STR / AFP

A major human rights group said Myanmar is carrying out a policy of apartheid against Rohingya Muslims languishing for eight years in internal displacement camps, accusing civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi of complicity in their persecution weeks before national elections.

႐ုိဟင္ဂ်ာေတြ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းမွာ ေနထုိင္ရတဲ့အေပၚ ျမန္မာအစုိးရကုိ HRW ေ၀ဖန္

VOA

ဗြီအိုေအ (ျမန္မာပုိင္း)

08 ေအာက္တိုဘာ၊ 2020  

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ စစ္ေတြၿမိဳ႕ရွိ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းမွာ ေတြ႔ရတဲ့ ျမင္ကြင္း။ (ဇူလိုင္ ၀၂၊ ၂၀၁၆) 

 

ႏိုင္ငံတကာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအဖြဲ႔တစ္ခုက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ၁၀၀,၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို စခန္းေတြထဲ ဆက္ ထိန္းသိမ္းထားတဲ့အေပၚ ျပင္းျပင္းထန္ထန္ ေဝဖန္လိုက္ပါတယ္။

HRW လို႔အတိုေခါက္ေခၚတဲ့ Human Rights Watch လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေစာင္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႔က ျမန္မာအစိုးရ အေနနဲ႔ ဒီရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ၁၃၀,၀၀၀ ကို ေနခ်င္စရာမရွိတဲ့ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္က စခန္းေတြထဲ ဆက္ထိန္းထားတာက လူမ်ိဳးေရးအရ ခြဲျခားဆက္ဆံတာျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ဒီေန႔ ထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္ပါတယ္။

ရခိုင္က ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္စခန္းေတြ ပိတ္သိမ္းေပးဖို႔ HRW ေတာင္းဆို

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အာရွအသံ ( RFA )

ျမန္မာဌာန | သတင္းမ်ား
ေနမ်ိဳးထြန္း
2020-10-08

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္က ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းေတြမွာရွိတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ မြတ္စလင္ ၁၃၀၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်သလို ကန႔္သတ္မႈေတြလုပ္ထားတာ ရွစ္ႏွစ္ၾကာၿပီျဖစ္တာေၾကာင့္ ဒီအေျခအေနကို အျမန္ဆုံး အဆုံးသတ္ေပးဖို႔ နယူးေယာက္ အေျခစိုက္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ HRW က ဒီကေန႔ အစီရင္ခံစာထုတ္ျပန္ၿပီး အစိုးရကို တိုက္တြန္းလိုက္ပါတယ္။

Bangladeshi officers beat Rohingya over hunger strike, claims rights group

The Telegraph 

By Nicola Smith,  

Asia Correspondent  

2 October 2020 

Human Rights Watch alleges the beatings occurred on the remote island of Bhasan Char last month 

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have been displaced since 2017 Credit: Zik Maulana/AP 

 

Bangladeshi naval officers beat Rohingya refugees, including children, with sticks and tree branches after they protested against their detention on the desolate island of Bhasan Char in the Bay of Bengal, Human Rights Watch has alleged.

According to reports received by the human rights organisation, the refugees were punished for going on hunger strike last month to demand reunification with their families in the sprawling refugee camps near the Bangladeshi coastal town of Cox’s Bazar. The authorities have denied the accusations.

Bangladesh: Protesting Rohingya Refugees Beaten

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

October 1, 2020

Authorities Prepare to Relocate Thousands to Dangerous Island

A man walks past buildings on Bhasan Char, or floating island, in the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh on December 19, 2019. © 2019 AP Photo/Saleh Noman

(New York) – Bangladesh authorities beat refugees protesting their detention on Bhasan Char Island with sticks and tree branches, Human Rights Watch said today. Naval officers allegedly beat the refugees, including children, in retribution for their hunger strike beginning on September 21, 2020 to demand reunification with their families in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps.

HRW asks Myanmar to end harassment of Rakhine media outlets

Financial Express

FE ONLINE REPORT
Published: September 01, 2020

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on Myanmar authorities to stop using criminal laws, website blocks, and licensing delays to severely restrict the two ethnic media outlets in Rakhine State.

The international rights organisation, in a statement on Tuesday, said the authorities have filed charges against Aung Marm Oo, chief editor of Development Media Group (DMG), under the rights-abusing Unlawful Associations Act, blocked access to the outlet’s English and Burmese language webpages, and failed to act on DMG’s application to renew the publishing license for its bimonthly print journal. Narinjara News, the other ethnic Rakhine media outlet, has also been blocked since March, the statement pointed out.

Malaysia: Stop Treating Rohingya Refugees as Criminals

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

July 22, 2020

Jailing, Caning Refugees Violates International Law 

A boat carries Rohingya refugees off the coast of Langkawi, Malaysia, April 5, 2020. Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency handout via AP

(Bangkok) – Malaysian authorities should stop prosecuting Rohingya refugees for illegal entry and ensure that they are protected in accordance with international law, Human Rights Watch said today.

At least 40 ethnic Rohingya who were picked up from a boat that arrived in Malaysian waters more than three months ago have been sentenced to seven months in prison. Fourteen children from the boat were sent to “shelters” and may also face criminal charges. Twenty-seven of the thirty-one men convicted also face three strokes of the cane – a brutal punishment that constitutes torture under international human rights law. A court will hear their application to set aside the caning sentence on July 22.

လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မႈ စြပ္စြဲခ်က္ေတြကို ေျဖရွင္းဖို႔ ျမန္မာအစိုးရကို တိုက္တြန္း

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အာရွအသံ ( RFA )
ျမန္မာဌာန | သတင္းမ်ား ျဖဴျဖဴခိုင္
2020-07-22

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္အေရး ကုလသမဂၢလုံျခဳံေရးေကာင္စီ အစည္းအေဝး ၂ဝ၁၇ ခုႏွစ္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၈ ရက္ေန႔က က်င္းပခဲ့စဥ္ Photo: AFP

ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအေပၚ နိုင္ငံတကာရဲ့ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မႈ စြပ္စြဲခ်က္ေတြကို ျငင္းဆန္မေနဘဲ လက္ေတြ႕ က်က် ပူးေပါင္းေျဖရွင္းသင့္တယ္လို႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးလႈပ္ရွားသူေတြက အစိုးရကို တိုက္တြန္းလိုက္ပါတယ္။

ကုလသမဂၢ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာင္စီမွာ UPR လို႔ေခၚတဲ့ ေလးႏွစ္တစ္ႀကိမ္ နိုင္ငံအားလုံးအလွည့္က် လူ႔အ ခြင့္ အေရးသုံးသပ္မႈ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မွာ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအေပၚ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မႈေတြနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ စြပ္ စြဲခ်က္ ေတြကို ျငင္းဆန္တဲ့နည္းနဲ႔ မေျဖရွင္းဘဲ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္တဲ့နည္းနဲ႔ အေျဖရွာသင့္တယ္လို႔ လူ႔အ ခြင့္အေရး တက္ႂကြလႈပ္ရွားသူေတြက တိုက္တြန္းလိုက္တာပါ။

Move Rohingya from flood-prone island: HRW urges Bangladesh

Aljazeera 
9th July2020

Rights group accuses authorities of using pandemic to detain refugees after 300 of them kept on Bhashan Char island.

View of the island of Bhasan Char in the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh February 14, 2018 [File: Reuters]

Human Rights Watch has called on Bangladesh to move more than 300 Rohingya refugees, including children, to the camps in Cox's Bazaar district, more than two months after they were quarantined on a small flood-prone island in the Bay of Bengal.

ဘာဆန္ခ်ာကၽြန္းက ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြ စခန္းထဲျပန္ေရႊ႕ေပးဖို႔ HRW ေတာင္းဆို

VOA

ဗြီအိုေအ (ျမန္မာပုိင္း)
09 ဇူလိုင္၊ 2020

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံ ဘာဆန္ခ်ာကၽြန္းမွာ ေတြ႔ရတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာတခ်ိဳ႕။ (ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီ ၁၄၊ ၂၀၁၈)

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံ ဘာဆန္ခ်ာကၽြန္းမွာ ရွိေနတဲ့ ႐ုိဟင္ဂ်ာ အေယာက္ ၃၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို အဲဒီကၽြန္းကေန အ ၿမန္ဆုံးေရႊ႕ေပးသင့္တယ္လုိ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖဲြ႔ (HRW) က ဒီေန႔ ေျပာလိုက္ပါ တယ္။ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္အာဏာပိုင္ေတြအေနနဲ႔ အဲဒီကၽြန္းမွာ ရွိေနတဲ့ ကေလးငယ္ေတြအပါအ၀င္ ႐ုိဟင္ဂ်ာ ဒုကၡ သည္ေတြကို Cox’s Bazar မွာရွိတဲ့ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ မိသားစု၀င္ေတြနဲ႔ အတူေနနုိင္ေအာင္ ခ်က္ခ်င္း ေရႊ႕ေပးသင့္ တယ္လို႔ HRW အဖဲြ႔က ေျပာလိုက္တာပါ။

ဘဂၤလားပင္လယ္ထဲက အႏၲရာယ္မ်ားတဲ့ ေျမႏုကၽြန္းေပၚ ေရာက္ေနတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြ

B B C

ဘီဘီစီ ၿမန္မာပိုင္း

2020.07.09

ေကာ့ဆက္ဘဇားက ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတစ္ခု (၂၀၁၇ ခုႏွစ္ )

သက္တမ္းႏုတဲ့ေျမႏုကၽြန္းတကၽြန္းေပၚမွာ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္အာဏာပိုင္ေတြရဲ့ စီစဥ္မႈအရ သြားေနေနရတဲ့ ရာနဲ ႔ခ်ီတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြကို ေကာ့ဆက္ဘဇား ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းေတြမွာ သူတို႔ရဲ့ မိသားစု ေဆြမ်ိဳးေတြနဲ႔ အတူျပန္ေနနိုင္ေရးအတြက္ အျမန္ျပန္ပို႔ေပးဖို႔ နိုင္ငံတကာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ Human Rights Watch က ေတာင္းဆိုေနပါတယ္။

လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ေမလအတြင္းကတည္းက သူတို႔ကို အဲဒီကၽြန္းမွာ ထားရွိတာျဖစ္ၿပီး ပင္လယ္ထဲေမ်ာေနခဲ့တဲ့ အဲဒီ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္ ၃၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကို ကိုဗစ္ - ၁၉ ဗိုင္းရပ္စ္ ျပန႔္ပြားမႈတားဆီးေရးအတြက္ ဘာစန္ ခ်ာ (Bhasan Char) ကၽြန္းကို ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက ကြာရန္တင္းလုပ္ဖို႔ထားခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။