Myanmar

According to the IIFFMM, the Tatmadaw engaged in arbitrary arrest and deprivation of liberty, leading to enforced disappearance and incommunicado detention for extended periods. This conclusion was reiterated by Nicholas Koumjian, Head of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), in a statement to the 48th Regular Session of the UN Human Rights Council, when he noted that since the military coup in February 2021 the IIMM had “received reports on the use of unjustified force against peaceful protestors, arbitrary arrests, torture, enforced disappearances and killings . . . More than ever, there is a need to end impunity and to break this cycle of violence.”

Human rights violations across Myanmar since the 2021 coup come on top of multiple cases of enforced disappearance related to the state violence that led up to 900,000 inhabitants of Rakhine State to flee their homes in 2017. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has approved a full investigation into the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Although Myanmar is not a member of the Rome Statute, the ICC ruled that it had jurisdiction because Bangladesh is a member. The massive number of refugees who fled to Bangladesh in 2017 joined hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who had fled Myanmar in previous years.

On 23 January 2020, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in the case of The Gambia v. Myanmar, in which The Gambia, on behalf of many other Muslim majority countries, called for emergency measures to be taken against the Tatmadaw, until a fuller investigation could be launched. The ICJ ordered, among other things, that Myanmar “shall take effective measures (…) to ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; (…)”