Q & A on an International Commission of Inquiry

By Human Rights Watch • March 24, 2011

In March 2010, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Burma, Tomás Ojea Quintana, called on the UN to consider the possibility of establishing a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into crimes in violation of international law committed in Burma. Thus far, 16 states have endorsed this call to address systematic, widespread, and serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Such abuses include war crimes and possible crimes against humanity by the Burmese armed forces and non-state armed groups.

Human Rights Watch calls on relevant UN bodies to establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate reports of violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in Burma by all parties, and to identify the perpetrators of such violations with a view to ensuring that those responsible are held accountable.

Introduction

Burma remains one of the most repressive countries in the world. State security forces commit arbitrary arrests, torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings with impunity. There are severe limits on the rights to freedom of expression, association, and assembly. The intelligence and security services are omnipresent. There is little freedom of the media, with an all-powerful Press Scrutiny and Registration Division censoring any critical analysis of the political system. The Burmese judiciary acts as an arm of government repression. Approximately 2,100 political prisoners suffer in Burma’s squalid prisons. These prisoners include many members of the political opposition, monks, nuns, journalists, and activists, who face torture and ill-treatment in prison.

At the same time, abuses connected to armed conflicts in ethnic minority areas persist. Burma has endured armed conflict from just after it was founded as an independent state in 1948. At one point in the 1980s, the central government was fighting approximately 30 non-state armed groups, ethnic and communist insurgents, including some as large as 20,000 fighters, which controlled and administered vast swathes of territory in Burma’s hinterlands. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the military government reached tentative ceasefire agreements with most of these rebel groups. Three major ethnic insurgent groups continue to fight in eastern Burma, particularly in Karen, Karenni, and Shan states. A low-intensity internal armed conflict with a major presence of Burmese armed forces continues in these areas. Over half a million people remain internally displaced as a result of the fighting since 1996, and tens of thousands have become refugees in Thailand. Fighting has increased in some areas of Burma since the military government staged sham elections in November 2010, as the Burmese army has renewed military operations against ethnic armed groups in Karen and Shan States.

To date, tens of thousands of civilians have been displaced on both sides of the border. Human Rights Watch has documented direct targeting of civilian areas by light and heavy artillery and small arms fire and civilians being compelled into carrying supplies into battle zones for the Burmese military and ethnic armed groups. Civilians have been forced to carry wounded combatants through areas containing anti-personnel landmines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and have been subject to ambush. Through investigations and interviews in the past several weeks, we believe that convict porters have been assembled from several prisons throughout Burma to carry supplies for the Burmese army on operations, often to walk ahead of troops to trigger landmines in a practice known as “atrocity de-mining.”

In western Burma, the Rohingya Muslim minority group has suffered state persecution for decades and was rendered stateless by discriminatory citizenship laws in 1982. The Rohingya were subject to two wide-scale forced eviction campaigns, in 1978 and 1991, that forced hundreds of thousands into neighboring Bangladesh. An estimated one million Rohingya live in desperate circumstances in western Burma, with widespread restrictions on movement, freedom of religion, access to basic services such as health and education, and curbs on access to employment and livelihoods. Human rights violations against the Rohingya minority are part of a long-evident state policy to force the population to leave Burma.

In Burma, impunity for serious human rights abuses committed by government forces was codified and became recognized under law as soon as the 2008 constitution came into force after the 2010 elections. Three major provisions in the 2008 constitution grant members of Armed Forces of Burma (called the Tatmadaw) and members of the military ruling councils since 1988, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) and the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), immunity from prosecution for past acts. Despite the ostensible creation of a civilian government after the 2010 elections, jurisdiction over the military remains completely in the hands of the chief of the defense forces. These provisions are contrary to international legal prohibitions against immunity for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.

Download the full Q&A in English or Burmese here.