FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW YORK — The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar today released a report documenting and analyzing sexual and gender-based violence committed by the country’s military, the Tatmadaw. The report represents the mission’s first thorough examination of gender-based crimes in Burma.

The mission’s report describes in detail the widespread and systemic use of sexual violence by the Tatmadaw. It also analyzes the gendered impacts of Burma’s ethnic conflicts. The Global Justice Center has advocated since 2005 for the need to ensure justice and accountability for sexual and gender-based violence in Burma and last year released “Discrimination to Destruction,” the first comprehensive legal analysis of gender-based crimes against ethnic Rohingya in the country.

“The Tatmadaw has for decades utilized sexual violence to subjugate and terrorize ethnic groups with impunity and we commend the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission for recognizing this critical fact,” said Akila Radhakrishnan. “To date, no military perpetrator of sexual violence has been held accountable in Burma for their crimes. As accountability proceedings begin, including at the International Criminal Court, it is essential that a robust gender lens and perspective informs the proceedings.”

The report includes the well-documented human rights abuses that occurred in Rakhine State against the Rohingya, but it also details gendered and sexual violence against ethnic communities in Kachin and Shan states. In addition, it contains a groundbreaking investigation of gender-based violence against transgender Rohingya, as well as men and boys. Importantly, the report also recognizes the links between gender inequality in Burma and the commission of sexual and gender-based crimes.

“Sexual and gender-based violence is, at its core, an expression of discrimination, patriarchy, and inequality,” said Radhakrishnan. “As a result, accountability for these crimes must be holistic and seek to address and transform the root causes of violence.”

The Global Justice Center has long worked to ensure that gender is analyzed in mass atrocity crimes, including in the crimes against Iraq’s Yazidi minority. It has also researched, written, and spoken out against the abuses of Burma’s military regime and gender inequality in the country for over a decade.

For more background on the gender-based crimes against the Rohingya as well as potential gender-inclusive solutions, a brief factsheet can be found here.

Two years ago, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya were violently driven from their homes in Burma in a military campaign that the United Nations has characterized as genocide. To this day, the military dictatorship who carried out these crimes has evaded any meaningful accountability.

Simon Adams, an expert on mass atrocity crimes and director of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, joins That's Illegal to discuss worldwide efforts to get justice for the Rohingya. Akila Radhakrishnan, director of the Global Justice Center, also joins the program.

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The United Nations, the US Congress, and the European Union are all on summer recess. For the Global Justice Center, however, the struggle for human rights never rests. 

We are busy preparing for a number of high-profile events and forums on the international stage, including an upcoming UN Security Council Arria meeting on accountability in Burma — an issue GJC has worked on for over a decade. We are also gearing up for the UN General Assembly beginning September 17.

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By Maryna Tkachenko

“Today, the Yazidis have largely been abandoned” — Nadia Murad, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and Yazidi survivor

August 3, 2014 changed the Yazidi community of Sinjar forever. The terrorist group Daesh killed and enslaved thousands of Yazidis, members of a small religious minority in northern Iraq that have been historically persecuted for being “devil worshippers.” In addition to carrying out coordinated attacks of violence against the group as a whole, Daesh explicitly targeted women and girls by inflicting widespread sexual violence in the form of rape, torture, and forced marriage. These gendered acts of the Yazidi genocide served as tools for recruitment, conversion, and forced indoctrination.

Five years later, despite a growing body of evidence, no Daesh fighter has been prosecuted for genocide of the Yazidi. In 2016, the United Nations recognized the attacks as a genocidal campaign, but Yazidis are still waiting for justice, hoping to return one day to their homes on the Sinjar Mountain.