Human Rights Documentation for the Rohingya

Human Rights Documentation for the Rohingya

Human Rights Documentation Project

 

ADI's human rights documentation project aims to deliver to the world the stories of victim-survivors from an objective point of view.  The project initially began as an attempt to investigate and document the massacre of the Muslim population in 2016 by extremist Buddhist leaders and the military in Meiktila, Myanmar.  After publishing a human rights report documenting the three-day massacre, we launched another project to survey the citizenship status of ethnic minorities in Myanmar. As part of this project, ADI conducted a workshop on human rights documentation with Odhikar, a Bangladeshi civil organization, and other citizens' groups including Banan.  In the same year, we submitted our survey report to the UN.  

 

Currently, human rights documentation is funded by several organizations, including Gwangju Human Rights Peace Foundation.  The project regularly provides Rohingya partners with training on human rights documentation. We aim to empower and support the Rohingya people to participate in the process of human rights documentation, so that they can be the representative of their own stories. 

 

In Korea, ADI strives to raise awareness of the Rohingya crisis in civil society.  ADI has published through various media channels, including Hankyoreh newspaper, and regularly organizes lectures by people with diverse backgrounds, including activists, the Rohingya, scholars, and UN Special Rapporteur, Yanghee Lee.

 

BACKGROUND

 

In October 2016, the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority in Rakhine state (also called Arakan), in northwestern Myanmar, were persecuted by the Myanmar government and military.  The violence included indiscriminate shooting, extrajudicial killing, mass rape, child murder, and arson. The Myanmar government sought to retaliate for the deaths of nine people at a security post following an attack by Rohingya rebel group ARSA (Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army).  The following year, on August 25, 2017, when ARSA attacked other police posts, the Myanmar government announced a massive crackdown on "terrorists." The same persecution from the previous year, targeted at Rohingya civilians, repeated, but this time on a much bigger scale. Since August 2017, the number of Rohingya to cross the border to Bangladesh has reached nearly 700,000, resulting in the world's most rapidly expanded refugee camp.  The UN described the Rohingya as the "most persecuted people in the world."