Cost cuts hit UN investigation into Rohingya genocide
The head of the investigation says that the financing deduction of millions of dollars that reduce the cost of the UN and the UN cost can undermine the efforts to collect evidence and seek justice for Rohingya, who escaped from Myanmar.
Nicholas Koumjian, Head of Independent Research Mechanism for Myanmar, said that his work was afraid that the return of the scale would harm the perpetrators of the perpetrators to justice.
In an interview in Geneva to Reuters, he said, “It will affect the ability to be convicted because because we lost the capacity.”
He said: “This will send a message of unpunished. He says to the perpetrators: Don’t worry about being accused.”
Approximately 750,000 Rohingya, a Muslim minority group, fled a Myanmar military attack in August 2017 – a campaign that is seen as an example of ethnic cleaning by prosecutors.
The Myanmar army said that the operation was a legitimate anti -terror campaign in response to the attacks of Muslim militants.
The mechanism established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2018 to analyze the serious violations of international law assists the judicial fields investigating the allegation of the persecution of Rohingya, including the International Criminal Court.
Koumjian said that unless more financing is received than the end of the year, the mechanism would have to stop both an open -source project and a project investigating crimes against sexual violence and children.
The famine comes in the midst of the UN liquidity crisis, ie only 73 percent of the mechanism’s $ 15 million (A23 million) annual budget.
According to a secret document by Reuters, it is faced with a lack of about $ 9 million (A14 million) for the next two years in voluntary grants from donors containing the UK, Canada and the EU.
A spokesman for a mechanism, who was asked to comment, said that he now predicted US $ 6.2 million (A9.6 million $).
“Trying to meet the budget with these limitations is a serious force,” Koumjian, a former prosecutor working in Bosnia and Sierra Leone War Crimes Cases, is serious. ” He said.
He said that the Trump administration ended two of the three grants and that other donors were funding from the end of the year without giving details.
The US State Department did not respond to the request for comments.
Since 2011, Washington said that since 2011, the most serious violations of international law in Myanmar and the most serious violations of witness protection have provided $ 3 million (A4.7 million $) to collect and analyze open source evidence.
The task of the mechanism includes both the investigation of crimes against Rohingya and violations in Myanmar since the 2021 military coup.
The ICC offered evidence to the International Court of Justice and Argentina and England.
Koumjian said that the protection and consultancy services of donors for witnesses have already stopped.
“The result of this may be very big, because sometimes we provide help for people in life -threatening situations,” he said.
This month, the mechanism said that Myanmar has found systematic proof of torture by security forces.
Myanmar’s military government said that he legally carried out “security measures” and did not arrest innocent civilians illegally, tortured or executed, and did not blame the “terrorists”.
Koumjian’s teams helped scan hundreds of thousands of social media posts from the 2017 Rohingya Hate Speech Campaign and found 43 accounts connected to the army.
A Myanmar military spokesman did not respond to Reuters’ interpretation of more than one call.
