We, Women’s Peace Network, welcome the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan KC’s application for an arrest warrant before the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I, against the Burmese military’s Commander-in-Chief, Min Aung Hlaing, for “the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of Rohingya, committed in Myanmar, and in part in Bangladesh.

The application has been long overdue. It follows an investigation that was requested by the ICC’s previous Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, to the Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber III in July 2019 on the atrocities against Rohingya in 2016 and 2017, and was approved by that chamber in November 2019.

In 2016 and 2017, the Burmese military launched its “clearance operations” against Rohingya in Rakhine State – killing over 10,000 men, women, children, and babies; arbitrarily arresting and detaining them; torturing and targeting them, including LGBTQ+ people, with rape, gang rape, sexual mutilation, and other forms of sexual violence; raiding and burning down over 392 of their villages; and forcing over 742,000 of them to flee their homes. These attacks were reported as amounting to genocide by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar among other international bodies. The military’s “clearance operations” followed multiple waves of state-sponsored violence against Rohingya, thereby aggravating the decades-long, systematic and targeted persecution of them as an ethnic and religious minority of Myanmar.

We hope that the arrest warrant will be issued without further delay. The 600,000 Rohingya remaining in Rakhine State are currently being targeted with atrocities by both the Burmese military and the Arakan Army – forcibly displacing over tens of thousands, including women and children, to areas of escalating armed conflict without humanitarian aid or to Bangladesh without access to refugee status determination. We fear that, at the status quo, Rohingya as a group will not survive to see justice, let alone their homes in Myanmar.

The international community must expressly support the Prosecutor’s application, and pursue actions for accountability for the full scale of atrocities against Rohingya and all other communities in Myanmar. Such actions must include the United Nations Security Council’s referral of the country’s situation to the ICC, or creation of an ad-hoc tribunal on it, and strong resolution on the situation in Myanmar; intervention in the International Court of Justice’s Gambia v. Myanmar, and use of universal jurisdiction for the prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Myanmar. All measures must be taken to expand the jurisdiction and other limitations of the ICC’s current investigation.

Failure to end the country’s decades-long impunity will further delay justice and accountability to victims and survivors of such mass atrocities; embolden perpetrators to commit more crimes against Rohingya and all other people of Myanmar; as well as prevent their safe, voluntary, dignified, and sustainable return home.

November 27, 2024