UK MPs for taking Myanmar regime to ICC

The United Kingdom must support efforts to refer Myanmar’s regime to the international criminal court for an alleged state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing of Rohingya people and human rights abuses, according to MPs on the international development select committee of the British parliament.
‘British taxpayers must be assured that their money is not being used to subsidise a government accused of crimes against humanity,’ said the committee’s chair, Stephen Twigg, according to The Guardian.
The committee stressed that Myanmar ‘must realise that there is a bill to pay for the actions of its army and the inaction of its government and society.’
‘This is not a challenge which Bangladesh should face alone. The international community should step up to provide a long-term plan for countries, which carry out a global “public good” by hosting refugees, migrants 
or displaced persons,’ Twigg said. 
The committee also called for a complete review of UK aid to Myanmar, which was worth £100m in 2018, saying the sums were agreed at the time it appeared that the country was on a transition to democracy. 
The committee concluded that no such transition, or any genuine peace process, ‘is underway’, adding they were barred from visiting the country to visit UK aid projects when visas were denied by Myanmar authorities at the highest level at the last minute.
The idea of collective action against the Myanmar regime has been stalled at the UN due to opposition from China, a veto-wielding member of the security council.
But the committee says the UK and allies should still seek to gather ‘support for the UN security council to refer Burma (Myanmar) to the international criminal court and to apply targeted financial sanctions at all identifiable key figures.’
Myanmar is not a signatory to the ICC.
It welcomed a move by the ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to seek a ruling whether she can investigate the deportation of thousands of minority Rohingya Muslims to Bangladesh.
There has been a tension within the UK’s Foreign Office over the degree to which Britain should give Myanmar’s state counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi, further leeway due to her need to appease a military junta that still runs foreign policy and defence.
But the British parliamentary committee says the former Nobel prize winner and political prisoner has become part of the problem. It accuses her of a ‘longstanding approach of denying human rights abuses have taken place and seeking to obstruct moves towards justice and accountability [and] failing to counter hate speech through positive speech and messages of tolerance and restraint’.
The MPs pointed out that, since the last British aid programme was prepared, ‘there has been ethnic cleansing, the breaking of ceasefires, a closing of civil society space, including restrictions on media freedoms and the persecution of journalists, and a reduction in religious freedom’.
Following this bleak assessment, the committee said the UK’s government’s language and actions towards Myanmar needed to change dramatically.
About 7,00,000 Rohingyas, mostly women, children and aged people, entered Bangladesh fleeing unbridled murder, arson and rape during ‘security operations’ by Myanmar military in Rakhine, what the United Nations denounced as ethnic cleansing and genocide, beginning from August 25, 2017.
The ongoing Rohingya influx took the number of undocumented Myanmar nationals and registered refugees in Bangladesh to about 11, 16,000, according to estimates by UN agencies and Bangladesh foreign ministry. 

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net