The international criminal court has approved a request from prosecutors to investigate crimes against humanity towards Myanmar’s Rohingya minority who were systematically driven across the border to Bangladesh.
More than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh since a 2017 crackdown by Myanmar’s military, which UN investigators say was carried out with “genocidal intent”. Buddhist-majority Myanmar has denied accusations of genocide.
In a statement, the ICC said prosecutors were granted permission to examine acts that could qualify as widespread or systematic crimes against the Rohingya, including deportation, a crime against humanity, and persecution on grounds of ethnicity and/or religion.
The Rohingya are Muslims who live in majority-Buddhist Myanmar. They are often described as "the world's most persecuted minority".
Nearly all of Myanmar's 1.1 million Rohingya lived in the western coastal state of Rakhine. The government does not recognise them as citizens, effectively rendering them stateless.
Extremist nationalist movements insist the group are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, although the Rohingya say they are native to Rakhine state.
In 2017 soldiers, police and local militias burned hundreds of Rohingya villages to the ground, and were also accused of gang-raping women and children, as well as slaughtering civilians indiscriminately.
By December 2017, an estimated 625,000 refugees from Rakhine, had crossed the border into Bangladesh. Recent attempts to repatriate them to Myanmar have floundered after authorities failed to convince significant numbers that it would be safe to return.
Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP
ICC judges also gave the chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, wider authority to look into crimes beyond the scope of her request and any future crimes within the court’s jurisdiction.
Although Myanmar is not a member of the ICC, the world’s permanent war crimes court has jurisdiction to examine alleged crimes that partially took place across the border in Bangladesh, which ratified the court’s statute in 2010.
In July, Bensouda requested court permission to examine crimes in Bangladesh and two waves of violence in Rakhine state on the territory of Myanmar.
Citing estimates that between 600,000 and 1 million Rohingyas were forcibly displaced, “the chamber hereby authorises the commencement of an investigation into the situation in Bangladesh/Myanmar”, the ICC statement said.
“There exists a reasonable basis to believe widespread and/or systematic acts of violence may have been committed that could qualify as the crimes against humanity of deportation across the Myanmar-Bangladesh border,” it said.