Lawyers representing some 400 refugees argue that now that the Rohingya people have crossed the border into Bangladesh — a signatory to the Rome Statute of the ICC — they could take action to hold Myanmar accountable.
The case can be described as “one person standing on one side of a border and shooting a person across the border; in that case, a crime is committed in both countries,” they argued.
“Without accountability, without focus on bringing these perpetrators to book, then these types of crimes will continue and are continuing in Myanmar as we speak,” Sky News quoted defense attorney Wayne Jordash as saying. “I have little doubt that they continue because the Myanmar authorities understand that legal options are narrow and bad state actors will shield them from accountability.”
He said the lawyers would press the charges of “apartheid, the crime of genocide and the crime of persecution... by the authorities in Myanmar” at the ICC.
Members of the Rohingya Muslim community have been killed, arbitrarily arrested, and raped by Myanmar’s forces and extremist Buddhists, who have also burned and destroyed Rohingya villages in mass arson attacks.
More than 700,000 members of the minority Muslim group have fled the state-sponsored violence to southeast Bangladesh over the past nine months.
The UN has described the campaign as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing, saying it possibly amounts to genocide as well.
