Call for ICC Investigation Into Ongoing Crimes Against the Rohingya in Bangladesh, Including Digital Deprivation and Surveillance of Refugees
Petra Molnar, Associate Director, Refugee Law Lab
March 13, 2024
Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh – 30 Nov 2018 (Photo by Azim Khan Ronnie, used with photographer’s permission)
In August 2017, the mass displacement of over 750,000 Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh captured international attention. Fleeing from the brutal ‘clearance operations’ by the Myanmar military and security forces, thousands of Rohingya men, women and children were killed or injured. Entire villages were razed to the ground. Although not unprecedented, these attacks against the Rohingya were unparalleled in magnitude, and marked the culmination of decades of restrictions, mistreatment, persecution, and dehumanization of the Rohingya by the Myanmar authorities.
Bangladesh admitted the fleeing Rohingya onto its territory, winning the appreciation and praise of the international community. The 750,000 Rohingya who fled in 2017, joined thousands of other Rohingya, displaced by earlier waves of violence, in crowded camps in Cox’s Bazar district in the southeast of Bangladesh. Today, more than six and a half years later, they remain there, with little hope of returning home or resettling in a third country. In December 2023, the population of these camps was approximately 972,000, around half of whom were children.
However, the ongoing situation of the Rohingya in the Bangladesh camps is catastrophic, and should be of concern to the international community as a whole. At the center of this crisis is the refusal of the Bangladeshi government to grant the Rohingya legal status but rather to create conditions of life that pressure their return to Myanmar. However, the Myanmar military regime which oversaw the 2017 atrocities remains in power in Myanmar, and continues to persecute Rohingya people, making safe repatriation impossible in the short-term. Longer-term solutions, including any integration of the Rohingya into Bangladesh society, have been rejected by Bangladesh. Instead it actively pursues policies directed at “worsening conditions in the camps and discouraging refugees from staying.” These policies include deliberately excluding the Rohingya from Bangladesh society, and limiting nearly all their basic human rights.
Technological repression is a major factor that exacerbates the ongoing Rohingya refugee situation. Prolonged and deliberate internet shutdowns continue to plague the camps, and mass online misinformation and disinformation campaigns, including by major global players like META (formerly known as Facebook) have led to the stoking of hateful sentiments, discrimination, and sharing of harmful materials with virtually no safeguards. For example, Amnesty International as well as local civil society organizations have reported that META was not a passive sharer of hateful materials but rather “proactively amplified and promoted content” that could be classified as hate speech against the Rohingya, targeting users in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Cybersecurity and privacy concerns around the sensitive personal data also remain a concern for Rohingya refugees. For example, in 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shared personal information from Rohingya refugees with the Myanmar government. While the UN agency’s public statements around this issue suggest that this sharing was inadvertent, it remains unclear what remedial measures have been put in place and according to Human Rights Watch also constitute a clear breach of the established principle of free and informed consent. Digital deprivation, discrimination, and social exclusion of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh is also compounded by people’s inability to access reliable mobile phones and wifi, and even the inability to obtain a Bangladeshi SIM card due to lack of ID.
Rohingya people in Bangladesh are further socially excluded by being prohibited from employment and commerce; are not permitted to move freely even within the camp; cannot register births or marriages; may not build durable, safe shelters; and are provided with only US$ 10 of food rations per person per month (providing a calorie intake below international minimum standards). Rohingya children are barred from formal education, even at the primary level. And amid proliferating organized criminality (including a skyrocketing homicide rate) and widespread domestic violence, Rohingya people have virtually no access to justice in Bangladesh. The cumulative result of these imposed conditions is to prevent Rohingya people from living a safe or dignified life, and from envisaging a future for their children. These restrictions set the backdrop for a more sinister reality, being the complicity and direct involvement of the Bangladesh authorities and police in violent attacks, arbitrary arrests and widespread extortion. In January 2024, Human Rights Watch called Bangladesh police abuses “rampant” in the camps, in a report which detailed instances of rape and other sexual violence against members of the Rohingya community. The undisguised motivation behind this treatment is Bangladesh’s desire to force the Rohingya out of the Cox’s Bazar camps and ultimately out of the country. Rohingya people are coerced to relocate to Bhasan Char, a remote island in the Bay of Bengal; or to return to Myanmar. Others inevitably flee the dreadful conditions in the hands of traffickers or smugglers, at extreme risk to their safety.
The available information provides a reasonable basis to believe that crimes against humanity are being committed against the Rohingya by Bangladeshi officials including: deportation, persecution on ethnic and/or racial grounds, other inhumane acts, and apartheid under Article 7(1) of the Rome Statute.
For these reasons, Petra Molnar, the Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab has presented a communication to the ICC Prosecutor seeking the investigation and prosecution of these crimes, which fall squarely within the current and ongoing investigation into crimes against the Rohingya, in line with the Prosecutor’s stated policy commitment to prioritize accountability for crimes against and affecting children and sexual and gender-based crimes.
Read the communication here.