The Pitfalls of International Justice in Myanmar

News Desk: Will threats of international criminal prosecutions against the junta’s leaders make compromise more likely – or less?

Today, a group representing Myanmar’s ousted civilian government announced that it had gathered 180,000 pieces of evidence of rights abuses by the country’s military junta, with which it hopes eventually to press criminal cases against high-ranking generals.

The announcement was made by the Committee for Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH), a group of parliamentarians from the National League for Democracy government that was ousted on February 1, an event that has plunged the country into crisis.

“CRPH has received 180,000 items of evidence. This evidence shows wide scale abuses of human rights by the military,” the group said in a short statement posted on social media. These include more than 540 extrajudicial executions, 10 deaths of prisoners in custody, torture, illegal detentions and disproportionate use of force against peaceful protests.

In the nine weeks since the military’s seizure of power, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners claims that at least 581 people have been killed by the security forces, a number that it admits is probably an underestimate.

The CRPH, which forms the nucleus of the parallel government that has emerged in opposition to the military junta, said its lawyers were scheduled to meet today with officials from the U.N.’s Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM). The statement said that the meeting was “intended to discuss the modalities of dialogue and cooperation between Myanmar (acting through CRPH) and the IIMM in relation to the atrocities committed by the military.”The IIMM was set up by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2018 to probe the Myanmar army’s brutal campaign against the Muslim Rohingya communities of Rakhine State in the country’s west, which drove more than 700,000 people over the border into Bangladesh. The IIMM is mandated to collect evidence of the most serious international crimes and violations of international law and prepare files for an eventual criminal prosecution of those deemed responsible.

The CRPH’s announcement incarnates a hope that if and when the junta has been forced from power, there will be sufficient evidence to charge senior leaders with the atrocities that they have committed since the coup, to say nothing of earlier crimes. This raises the possibility that perpetrators of grave crimes will be held accountable to the victims and their families, whether in domestic courts or international organs such as the International Criminal Court (ICC).