“Interactive dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar (oral progress update)"

Agenda Item 4: - Human rights situations that require the Council's attention

Statement by: Association Ma'onah for Human Rights and Immigration

22 September 2020

Thank you, President,

We thank the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar for engaging in this dialogue.

The widespread and systematic violence against the Rohingya Muslims amounts to genocide. Myanmar security forces carry out the most brutal violations, including sexual-based violence and the killing of children. Rape is used systematically and deliberately as a weapon of war, amounting to a war crime.

We would like to draw the Special Rapporteur’s attention to the recent admissions of two soldiers from the Myanmar army before the International Criminal Court. They confirmed that the so-called ‘clearance operations’ of Rohingya Muslims at the end of August 2017 proceeded under orders to “shoot all they see and all they hear”. They further confessed to gang-raping Rohingya women and girls, mass murder, and burying bodies in mass graves. Their damning confessions clearly represent the ‘genocidal intent’ with which the grave human rights violations are committed.

Ma’onah and Geneva International Centre for Justice extend its continued support to the Special Rapporteur and urge him to take the necessary steps towards combating impunity. We further call on Myanmar to cooperate with the Special Rapporteur.

Myanmar authorities continuously deny the brutal human rights violations committed against Rohingya Muslims and have failed to hold perpetrators accountable. The climate of impunity in Myanmar enables war crimes, genocide, and other gross human rights violations to persist. This cannot be tolerated and must be dismantled through a global effort.

The Special Rapporteur and the Council must recognize and condemn the systematic human rights violations in Myanmar as genocide and crimes against humanity.

Thank you.

Justice, Human rights, Geneva, geneva4justice, GICJ, Geneva International Centre For Justice