Information about the genocide reported to the world

In 2017–18, KIOS supported a joint project of two Asian NGOs to bring the genocide of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar to the attention and agenda of the international community.

Rohingya living in the Rakhine state of Myanmar are an ethnic and religious minority who are discriminated against and persecuted. From August 2017, violence by Myanmar security forces against the Rohingya intensified. Rohingya villages were destroyed, women were gang-raped and children and family members were burned to death in their houses or shot in Myanmar army camps. More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh, where they currently live in over-populated refugee camps.

In the project supported by KIOS, the Hong Kong-based Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) collaborated with Bangladeshi human rights defenders to gather information on the situation and obtain testimonies from one hundred Rohingya refugees in Bangladeshi refugee camps about human rights violations committed against them.

This information was delivered to both the UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ALRC issued statements to the United Nations Human Rights Council and met both the UN team investigating Myanmar and the Prosecutor of the ICC. The information provided to the ICC in 2018 also received attention in the international press. In November 2019, the ICC decided to continue to investigate the crimes against the Rohingya people in Myanmar.