International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim AA Khan on Wednesday announced that his office was filing an application to the Pre-Trial Chamber I of the ICC for a warrant of arrest against Myanmar Senior General and acting president Min Aung Hlaing for the ‘crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya’.
‘After an extensive, independent and impartial investigation, my office has concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Senior General and acting president Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the Myanmar Defence Services, bears criminal responsibility for the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya, committed in Myanmar, and in part in Bangladesh,’ said Unified Team of the ICC Prosecutor Office head Essa Mbye Faal while reading out a statement of ICC prosecutor Karim Khan at a press conference in Dhaka.
Responding to a question, Essa said it was a historic movement since it was the first application for an arrest warrant against a high-level Myanmar government official being filed by the office of the ICC prosecutor.
He said that the ICC judges might take time in issuing the arrest warrant, but it did not happen in the past that such application from the prosecution was rejected.
Essa, a defence counsel at ICC, said that the arrest warrant issued by the ICC was a legal binding for all state parties. But Myanmar was not a party there and so they had no legal obligation to execute the arrest warrant, he added. Â
Asked whether they could help Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal that recently issued arrest warrant against 46 leaders of Awami League including deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina and its allies and security officials, he said that they were always available to provide technical support to the ICT dealing with cases relating to crimes against humanity and genocide.Â
Referring to the written statement of the ICC prosecutor who visited a Rohingya camp in Cox’s Bazar on Tuesday, Essa said that since 14 November 2019, they had been investigating alleged crimes committed during the waves of violence in Rakhine State, Myanmar, in 2016 and 2017 and the subsequent exodus of Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh.
‘My Office alleges that these crimes were committed between 25 August 2017 and 31 December 2017 by the armed forces of Myanmar, the Tatmadaw, supported by the national police, the border guard police, as well as non-Rohingya civilians,’ the ICC prosecutor said in the statement.
The application draws upon a wide variety of evidence from numerous sources such as witness testimonies, including from a number of insider witnesses, documentary evidence and authenticated scientific, photographic and video materials.
In the statement, also made available on the ICC official site, Karim said that in his visits to the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar over the last three years, including just Tuesday, he met with Rohingya women who spoke with clarity and purpose about the need for accountability.
For Rohingya refugees who fled brutal violence in Myanmar, the announcement on Wednesday that the International Criminal Court prosecutor was seeking an arrest warrant for the junta chief, sparked celebrations, Agence France-Presse reported from Cox’s Bazar.
‘We are happy to hear about ICC issuing an arrest warrant against the Myanmar military commander Min Aung Hlaing,’ said Rohingya civil society leader Sayod Alam, living in the cramped refugee camps in Bangladesh.
‘It’s a success for us.’
Around a million members of the stateless and persecuted Muslim minority live in a sprawling patchwork of Bangladeshi relief camps of Cox’s Bazar, after fleeing killings in their homeland next door in Myanmar, the AFP report said.
Min Aung Hlaing — who was head of the army during the 2017 crackdown, now the subject of a UN genocide investigation — has dismissed the term Rohingya as ‘imaginary’.
The Rohingya endured decades of discrimination in Myanmar, where successive governments classified them as illegal immigrants despite their long history in the country.
