A human rights group and 16 people from Myanmar have filed a criminal complaint in Germany seeking punishment of Myanmar's generals for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity they alleged were committed in that country after their 2021 government takeover and during a 2017 crackdown on minority Rohingya Muslims.
Fortify Rights, a complainant in the case announced Tuesday in Bangkok, said “the individuals responsible for crimes related to both have yet to be held accountable.”
Activists seeking accountability have also filed cases in national courts in Argentina, Turkey and now Germany as well, under the concept of universal jurisdiction. The complaint was filed days before the anniversary of the military’s Feb. 1, 2021, seizure of power from an elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, who is now serving a 33-year prison sentence for alleged crimes widely thought to have been concocted to legitimize military rule. The German complaint also comes more than five years after the brutal 2017 counterinsurgency operation carried out by Myanmar’s security forces against the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority.
According to Fortify Rights, the latter include students, scholars, farmers, former village heads and homemakers, and are from multiple ethnic groups. “The Myanmar military killed seven members of her family in the attack on her village and, in a separate incident, cut her with a knife, leaving permanent scars,” Fortify Rights said. It said she “witnessed piles of dead bodies of Rohingya civilians in her village and military soldiers stabbing, beating, and killing numerous Rohingya men and children. Soldiers killed one child as he begged them for drinking water.
German courts applying the principle of universal jurisdiction have in the past few years obtained convictions in cases of torture carried out in Syrian prisons and crimes committed by members of the Islamic State group.
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