Indian rights lawyer to lead UN probe into Rohingya crackdown ‎

(Vatican Radio)  The United Nations has named a three-member team headed by an Indian woman lawyer to probe alleged atrocities by Myanmar’s security forces against Rohingya Muslims, a move that has been long opposed by the government. 

The President of the Human Rights Council, Ambassador Joaquín Alexander Maza Martelli of El Salvador, on Tuesday appointed India’s Supreme Court lawyer, Indira Jaising to head the team that includes Sri Lankan lawyer Radhika Coomaraswamy and Australian rights consultant Christopher Dominic Sidoti.

The Council decided on 24 March to urgently dispatch an independent international fact-finding mission to “establish facts and circumstances of the alleged recent human rights violations by military and security forces, and abuses, in Myanmar, in particular in Rakhine State”. 

Crimes against humanity

Some 75,000 Rohingya fled northwestern Rakhine state to Bangladesh after the Myanmar army carried out a security operation last October in response to attacks by Rohingya insurgents on border posts in which nine police officers were killed.  A U.N. report from February, based on interviews with some of the Rohingya refugees, said Myanmar's security forces have committed mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya in a campaign that "very likely" amounts to crimes against humanity and possibly ethnic cleansing.

Myanmar has opposed UN probe

Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of Myanmar's civilian government and also its foreign minister, has said she would only accept recommendations from a separate advisory commission led by former U.N. chief Kofi Annan. Any other input would "divide" communities, she has said.

Myanmar diplomats have rejected the move as "not acceptable" and "not in harmony with the situation on the ground and our national circumstances". They asked for time for its national investigation to conclude its findings.

The fact-finding mission is scheduled to present an oral update to the Human Rights Council at its ‎thirty-sixth session in September this year and a full report at its thirty-seventh session in March 2018.‎  The members of the Mission are expected to meet in Geneva in the coming weeks to plan their agenda ‎and work for the months ahead.‎

Jaising, 76, who in 1981 co-founded the “Lawyers Collective”, an NGO fighting for human rights especially ‎women’s rights, had drafted India's first domestic violence act, allowing women to bring civil and criminal suits against attackers for the first time.  She was India’s first woman to be designated a Senior Advocate by ‎the High Court of Bombay in 1986, and first female Additional Solicitor General of the country from ‎‎2009 until 2014.

Coomaraswamy, a civil society member of the Constitutional Council, is a former chairperson of the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission and director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies. She has worked as the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, and as Under-Secretary-General and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict.

Sidoti is an international human rights consultant, specializing in the international human rights system and in national human rights institutions who, since 2000, has provided consultancy services on human rights law and practices to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNDP, UNICEF, the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions and several national human rights institutions.