Investigator: UN, International Community Fail to Hold Myanmar Accountable for Crimes Against Rohingya

VOA

By Lisa Schlein
July 3, 2019 

Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee gives her report to the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 11, 2019. 

GEVENA, SWITZERLAND - A U.N. investigator says the United Nations and international community have failed to hold the government of Myanmar accountable for decades of persecution and repression against the minority Rohingya Muslims. The report from the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar is under discussion at the U.N. Human Rights Council.

More than one million Rohingya refugees have fled to Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh to escape violence, persecution and death in Myanmar. U.N. investigator Yanghee Lee says she is concerned the international community is beginning to overlook their situation.

UN warns of possible new war crimes in Myanmar

THE GURDIAN
Hannah Ellis-Petersen
Thu 4 Jul 2019

Special rapporteur tells of abductions and torture of civilians by Myanmar military and insurgent group

 The UN special rapporteur to Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, said the situation in Myanmar was worsening by the day. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

Human rights abuses that may amount to fresh war crimes are being committed against civilians in Myanmar’s restive Rakhine and Chin states, the UN has said, as the fighting between the military and rebel groups intensifies.

Speaking to the UN human rights council (UNHRC), Yanghee Lee, the UN special rapporteur on Myanmar, detailed accounts of abduction and torture of civilians by both the Myanmar army and the rebel insurgent group the Arakan Army, which is fighting for greater autonomy in the region.

“The conflict with the Arakan Army in northern Rakhine state and parts of southern Chin state has continued over the past few months and the impact on civilians is devastating,” Lee told the UNHRC on Tuesday. “Many acts of the Tatmadaw [Myanmar armed forces] and the Arakan Army violate international humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes, as well as violating human rights.”

ရခိုင္မွာ စစ္တပ္နဲ႔ AA တို႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖါက္ ေၾကာင္း ယန္ဟီးလီ ေျပာ

RFA 

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ အာရွအသံ

02.07.2019

■ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္မွာ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္နဲ႔ AA တပ္ဖြဲ႕ ႏွစ္ဖက္လံုးက အရပ္သားျပည္သူေတြအေပၚ လူ႔အခြင့္အေ ရး ခ်ိဳးေဖါက္မႈေတြ က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့ၾကတယ္လို႔ ကုလသမဂၢရဲ႕ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ လြတ္လပ္တဲ့ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကၽြမ္းက်င္သူ ယန္ဟီးလီ က ေျပာပါတယ္။

ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့လေတြအတြင္း ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ေျမာက္ပိုင္းနဲ႔ ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္ ေတာင္ပိုင္းမွာ စစ္ေရးပဋိပကၡေတြ ဆက္ လက္ေပၚေပါက္ခဲ့တဲ့အတြက္၊ ေဒသခံျပည္သူေတြအေပၚ ဆိုးက်ိဳးသက္ေရာက္မႈေတြရွိခဲ့ေၾကာင္း၊ ႏွစ္ဖက္ တပ္ေတြဟာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးနဲ႔ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာေရး ဥပေဒေတြ ခ်ိဳးေဖါက္ခဲ့ၾကသလို၊ စစ္ရာ ဇ၀တ္မႈေတြ က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့ၾကေၾကာင္း အဂၤါေန႔က ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ပါတယ္။


ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ သီတင္းပတ္ကလည္း ရခိုင္နဲ႔ ခ်င္းမွာ အင္တာနက္ မိုဘိုင္းဖုန္းဆက္သြယ္ေရးကို စစ္တပ္က ပိတ္ လိုက္တဲ့ကိစၥအေပၚ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ိဳးေဖါက္မႈအျဖစ္ ကုလသမဂၢမွာ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့သလို၊ AA ကလည္း ပလက္ ၀ၿမိဳ႕က ေဆာက္လုပ္ေရးအလုပ္သမား ၁၂ ဦးနဲ႔ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္နယ္စပ္အနီးက ရြာသူရြာသား ၅၂ ဦး အပါအ ၀င္ အရပ္သားေတြကို ျပန္ေပးဆြဲခဲ့ေၾကာင္းလည္း ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ပါတယ္။

Photo: Yanghee Lee's Twitter
RFA Burmese Face Book

Interview: ‘I Really Think That Myanmar is Going Down a Dark Path Now’

RFA
2019-06-27

Yanghee Lee, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, discusses the Myanmar military and human rights in the Southeast Asian nation during a video call with RFA, June 26, 2019.

Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, has been an outspoken critic of Myanmar’s powerful military and its brutal crackdowns on Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state in 2016 and 2017. She has called for the prosecution of those responsible for committing suspected acts of genocide against the Rohingya, and blasted the armed forces for their treatment of other ethnic minorities in conflict zones in Kachin and northern Shan states. In late 2017, the Myanmar government barred Lee from visiting the country to assess the rights situation after it said a previous mission report she issued was biased and unfair.