25 August 2023
Ensure justice for Rohingya, end military’s impunity for genocide
Restore Rohingya’s citizenship and rights, coordinate support for refugees
Marking the sixth-year remembrance of the Rohingya genocide in 2017, 356 civil society
organizations reaffirm our solidarity with the Rohingya community in the pursuit of justice and
accountability for victims and survivors, call for an end to impunity of grave crimes perpetrated by
the Myanmar military, and urge for the immediate restoration of Rohingya’s rights and citizenship.
The world must not forget the Rohingya’s plight. Most importantly, the international community
must take responsibility for their human rights and humanitarian obligations for the Rohingya
community.
Six years ago, the Myanmar military launched “clearance operations” and unleashed a wave of
massacres, torture, rape, and burning of villages against the Rohingya in Rakhine State, forcing over
750,000 – many of them children – to seek refuge in Bangladesh where a quarter of a million
Rohingya had previously fled from persecutions by the military. Today, almost one million Rohingya
are suffering in squalid, overcrowded refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, longing to return
to their home in Myanmar with dignity, citizenship and with their full rights restored and justice
served.
To actualize Rohingya’s sustainable return to Myanmar, the military’s prevailing impunity must end,
and accountability must be established for its grave atrocity crimes, primarily through criminal
prosecution of individuals most responsible. Yet, minimal progress towards justice and
accountability has been achieved by the international community. Following the coup attempt of 1
February 2021, the passivity, negligence and in some cases total inaction of the international
community, in particular ASEAN, once again emboldens Myanmar’s war criminals to further their
atrocities against the people across Myanmar unabated and unpunished.
Six years of injustice for the Rohingya have enabled fresh atrocity crimes and mass internal
displacement of over 1.6 million people that have engulfed Myanmar for the last 30 months,1 just as
the decades-long impunity for the Myanmar military’s war crimes and crimes against humanity
endured by ethnic minority communities had allowed the Rohingya genocide to occur in the first
place. Without concerted actions from the world to realize full justice and accountability, Myanmar
remains vulnerable to descend into vicious cycles of multi-dimensional catastrophe and rampant
violence.
We welcome the hearing before the Argentinian federal court in a historic universal jurisdiction case
filed by Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK) against Myanmar military leaders for the
Rohingya genocide, which has paved the way for similar efforts in Germany and Turkey. With these
ongoing cases, respective countries’ governments must readily provide legal, financial and technical
support to achieve justice and guarantee remedies and reparation for victims and survivors of the
junta’s heinous crimes. The lawsuit in Argentina, in tandem with The Gambia vs Myanmar case at
the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC)
into the forced deportation of Rohingya to Bangladesh, however, would not allow for all crimes
committed against the Rohingya and other ethnic communities and people across Myanmar over
the past two years to be entirely prosecuted. The international community must take concrete
actions to advance justice and accountability in other avenues, namely a UN Security Council referral
of the situation in Myanmar to the ICC or the establishment of an ad hoc tribunal.
1
This number by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is a gross
understatement. The actual numbers reported by local responders with direct access to communities indicate
a far higher estimate than that reported by OCHA.
1