GENEVA: The UN Human Rights Council voted Thursday to set up a panel to prepare criminal indictments over atrocities committed in Myanmar, amid allegations of genocide against the Rohingya minority.
The top UN rights body voted to “establish an ongoing independent mechanism to collect, consolidate, preserve and analyze evidence of the most serious international crimes and violations of international law committed in Myanmar since 2011.”
The text, a collaboration between the European Union and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, says the panel will be responsible for preparing “files in order to facilitate and expedite fair and independent criminal proceedings... in national, regional or international courts or tribunals.”
Thirty-five of the council’s 47 members voted in favor of the resolution while only three — China, the Philippines and Burundi — voted against.
The remainder either abstained or refrained from casting a vote.
The text was presented after a damning report was released to the council earlier this month, outlining in meticulous and searing detail atrocities against the Rohingya, who fled a violent military campaign that started in August last year.
The 444-page report by a UN fact-finding mission concluded there was enough evidence to merit investigation and prosecution of Myanmar’s army chief and five other top military commanders for crimes against humanity and genocide against the Rohingya.
Troops, sometimes aided by ethnic Rakhine mobs, committed murder, rape, arson and torture, using unfathomable levels of violence and with a total disregard for human life, investigators concluded.
More than 700,000 of the stateless Muslim minority took refuge in Bangladesh, where they remain — fearful of returning to mainly Buddhist Myanmar despite a repatriation deal between the two countries.
The military has denied nearly all wrongdoing, justifying its crackdown as a legitimate means of rooting out Rohingya militants.
The UN and rights groups meanwhile say the operations were vastly disproportionate and a troop build-up in the area occurred before insurgents attacked police posts in August 2017.
Further pressuring Myanmar, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague independently ruled that it had jurisdiction to open a preliminary investigation, even though the country has not signed the treaty underpinning the court.
Thursday’s text took note of the ICC ruling, and requested “the mechanism to cooperate closely with any of its future investigations pertaining to human rights in Myanmar.”
The resolution also said the mandate of the UN fact-finding mission should be extended until the new mechanism is operational.
Thursday’s decision marks the first time the Human Rights Council has itself opted to create such a mechanism.
A similar panel was created in late 2016 to build cases for the prosecution of war crimes in Syria, but it was set up following a vote in the General Assembly in New York.
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New UN panel to prepare indictments over Myanmar atrocities
New UN panel to prepare indictments over Myanmar atrocities
- The UN Human Rights Council voted Thursday to set up a panel to prepare criminal indictments over atrocities committed in Myanmar.
- Thirty-five of the council’s 47 members voted in favor of the resolution while only three voted against.
Spanish police evict hundreds of migrants from squat deemed a safety hazard
BARCELONA: Police in northeastern Spain began carrying out eviction orders Wednesday to clear an abandoned school building where hundreds of mostly undocumented migrants were living in a squat north of Barcelona.
Knowing that the eviction was coming, most of the occupants had left before police in riot gear from Catalonia’s regional police entered the school’s premises early in the morning under court orders.
The squat was located in Badalona, a working class city that borders Barcelona. Many sub-Saharan migrants, mostly from Senegal and Gambia, had moved into the empty school building since it was left abandoned in 2023.
The mayor of Badalona, Xavier García Albiol, announced the evictions in a post on X. “As I had promised, the eviction of the squat of 400 illegal squatters in the B9 school in Badalona begins,” he wrote.
Lawyer Marta Llonch, who represents the squatters, said that many of them lived from selling scrap metal collected from the streets, while a few others have residency and work permits but were forced to live there because they couldn’t afford housing.
“Many people are going to sleep on the street tonight,” Llonch told The Associated Press. “Just because you evict these people it doesn’t mean they disappear. If you don’t give them an alternative place to live they will now be on the street, which will be a problem for them and the city.”
García Albiol, of the conservative Popular Party, has built his political career as Badalona’s long-standing mayor with an anti-immigration stance.
The Badalona town hall had argued that the squat was a public safety hazard. In 2020, an old factory occupied by around a hundred migrants in Badalona caught fire and four people were killed in the blaze.
Like other southern European countries, Spain has for more than a decade seen a steady influx of migrants who risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean or Atlantic in small boats.
While many developed countries have taken a hard-line position against migration, Spain’s left-wing government has said that legal migration has helped its economy grow.
Knowing that the eviction was coming, most of the occupants had left before police in riot gear from Catalonia’s regional police entered the school’s premises early in the morning under court orders.
The squat was located in Badalona, a working class city that borders Barcelona. Many sub-Saharan migrants, mostly from Senegal and Gambia, had moved into the empty school building since it was left abandoned in 2023.
The mayor of Badalona, Xavier García Albiol, announced the evictions in a post on X. “As I had promised, the eviction of the squat of 400 illegal squatters in the B9 school in Badalona begins,” he wrote.
Lawyer Marta Llonch, who represents the squatters, said that many of them lived from selling scrap metal collected from the streets, while a few others have residency and work permits but were forced to live there because they couldn’t afford housing.
“Many people are going to sleep on the street tonight,” Llonch told The Associated Press. “Just because you evict these people it doesn’t mean they disappear. If you don’t give them an alternative place to live they will now be on the street, which will be a problem for them and the city.”
García Albiol, of the conservative Popular Party, has built his political career as Badalona’s long-standing mayor with an anti-immigration stance.
The Badalona town hall had argued that the squat was a public safety hazard. In 2020, an old factory occupied by around a hundred migrants in Badalona caught fire and four people were killed in the blaze.
Like other southern European countries, Spain has for more than a decade seen a steady influx of migrants who risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean or Atlantic in small boats.
While many developed countries have taken a hard-line position against migration, Spain’s left-wing government has said that legal migration has helped its economy grow.
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