UN investigator says Myanmar post-coup abuses a ‘major focus’

The head of a United Nations team investigating human rights abuses in Myanmar has said that the scope and scale of alleged international crimes taking place in Myanmar “broadened dramatically” during the past year, as the military sought to assert its control in the wake of the February 2021 coup.

The UN established the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) in 2018 to investigate the military crackdown in northwestern Rakhine State that sent hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh and is now the subject of a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The IIMM aims to gather evidence and build case files for proceedings in national, regional, or international courts.

Its head Nicholas Koumjian told the UN’s Human Rights Council that incidents following the coup were now also a “major focus” of its investigations.

Myanmar was plunged into crisis by the coup, which prompted a mass protest movement that has developed into armed rebellion. Some 2,273 people have been killed and more than 15,000 arrested, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which has been monitoring the situation.

“These events have been prioritized for investigation on the basis of a preliminary assessment of the gravity of the crimes concerned, including their scale, nature, manner of commission and impact on victims and the
likelihood of a court or tribunal taking jurisdiction over the crime(s) in question,” Koumjian said in the IIMM’s latest update (PDF) on the situation in Myanmar, which covers the year until the end of June 2022.

Agencies