It is curious that so few written documents on policy are ever disseminated by the Myanmar government. How many written documents in any language can you count that have been disseminated on HIV policy by the government. But policy documents exist. Here is the summary of a report on government policy documents. The full report is here: http://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Policies_of_Persecution_Feb_25_Fortify_Rights.pdf

Jamie

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Policies of Persecution
Ending Abusive State Policies Against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar
Fortify Rights
February 2014

Summary

Leaked official documents obtained by Fortify Rights reveal explicit government policies imposing extensive restrictions on the basic freedoms of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. The never-before published orders and guidelines outline discriminatory policies and abusive enforcement methods plainly designed to control the Rohingya population in the predominantly Rohingya townships of northern Rakhine State. This report provides evidence that protracted human rights violations against Rohingya result from official state policies and could amount to the crime against humanity of persecution.

The documents obtained by Fortify Rights detail restrictions on movement, marriage, childbirth, home repairs and construction of houses of worship, and other aspects of everyday life. Confidential enforcement guidelines empower security forces to use abusive methods to implement these “population control” measures. The evidence presented in this report indicates the involvement of Rakhine State and central government authorities in the formulation and implementation of these policies.

For nearly 50 years, the population in Rakhine State struggled under repressive military rule, and ethno-religious tensions between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims have persisted for generations. Many Rakhine claim to feel threatened by the Muslim population and oppressed by the central government, and they have been intent on
forcing Rohingya out of what they regard as their exclusive ancestral homeland. These tensions have fueled significant waves of violence and well-coordinated arson attacks in Rakhine State since 2012, targeting the Rohingya population and other Muslim communities. While Buddhists and Muslims have sustained casualties, in some cases state security forces participated in violence against Rohingya or failed to protect Rohingya communities under attack. Several hundred men, women, and children have been killed and entire Muslim neighborhoods and villages have been razed.

While the outbreaks of violence have commanded global attention, the insidious abuses exposed in this report stay under the radar, cutting to the core of Rohingya daily life and ensuring northern Rakine State remains vulnerable to serious unrest.

Policies of Persecution: Ending Abusive State Policies Against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar is based primarily on 12 internal government documents, eight of which outline official policies targeting Rohingya in Rakhine State. This includes three Rakhine State “regional orders,” five addenda to the regional orders, and four additional government documents relating specifically to Muslim citizens in areas outside Rakhine State. This report also draws on interviews with Rohingya in Myanmar and Rohingya asylum-seekers in Thailand, and discussions with aid workers, scholars, journalists, and others.

The three regional orders obtained by Fortify Rights date from 1993 to 2008, and the five addenda date from 2007 or earlier. These eight documents are published for the first time as appendices in this report. The four additional internal government documents considered for this report are dated March 2013 and remain unpublished here due to security concerns.

UN Special Rapporteurs and agencies, international organizations and news media, and increasingly Rohingya themselves have documented for decades the adverse impacts of the policies explained in this report. The actual policies, however, have never been published.

Since 2005, Myanmar has imposed a strict two-child policy for Rohingya in the townships of Maungdaw and Buthidaung in northern Rakhine State, in violation of human rights law. “Regional Order 1/2005” appears to lay the foundation for the two-child policy, requiring Rohingya “who have permission to marry” to “limit the number of children, in order to control the birth rate so that there is enough food and shelter.” This order also prohibits
Rohingya from having children out of wedlock. As a result of the two-child policy, women have undergone illegal and unsafe abortions, leading to serious health consequences and even death. These restrictions violate the right to marry and found a family, in addition to other rights that are protected under treaty-based and customary international law.

A document obtained by Fortify Rights explaining enforcement methods for these “population control” policies instructs officials to force Rohingya women to breastfeed infants in the presence of soldiers “if there is suspicion of someone being substituted [in the family registry],” in order to confirm the women are the birth mothers and to accurately record the number of children in each family.

Official orders issued by Rakhine State authorities from 1993 to 2008 outline a consistent state policy of restrictions on marriage imposed against Rohingya in Rakhine State. A document entitled “Requirements for Bengalis [Rohingya] who apply for Permission to Marry,”details ten requirements for the authorities to approve a marriage between Rohingya. The process is often humiliating and financially prohibitive for Rohingya and it violates the right
to marriage as articulated by Article 23 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Other ethnic groups in Myanmar are not required to ask the state for permission to marry, making the requirements on Rohingya discriminatory.

Other documents obtained by Fortify Rights outline policies related to restrictions on freedom of movement. Rohingya in Rakhine State cannot travel within or between townships without authorization and can only travel outside the state in rare circumstances with additional, difficult-to-obtain authorizations. The restrictions imposed upon Rohingya freedom of movement are not in line with international human rights standards, as they are not
narrowly tailored “to protect national security, public order, public health or morals, or the rights and freedoms of others.” Restrictions on movement also interfere with other human rights for Rohingya, such as the right to health— Rohingya are prevented from travelling freely to neighboring village tracts or townships for medical treatment.

Several documents obtained by Fortify Rights explicitly provide criminal punishments for Rohingya who violate the restrictions, with penalties including up to several years in prison, fines, or both.

There are at least 1.33 million Rohingya in Myanmar. All but 40,000 are stateless due to the country’s 1982 Citizenship Law, which denies Rohingya equal access to citizenship and the rights it entails. The government openly denies the existence of the Rohingya ethnicity, refers to its members instead as “Bengali,” and regards them as “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh, despite the fact that they have lived in Myanmar for generations. The
restrictions imposed on Rohingya are ostensibly framed by the government of Myanmar as a response to an “illegal immigration” problem and threats to “national security.”

All of the restrictions and enforcement methods described in this report appear to remain in effect at the time of writing. Senior government officials and ministers of the central government have openly discussed several of them, privately and on record, both before and after violence erupted in Rakhine State in 2012.

In parliament in 2011, for instance, the Minister of Defense at the time, Lieutenant-General Hla Min, approvingly referenced and explained the restrictive policies against Rohingya, and on July 31, 2012, Myanmar’s Minister of Home Affairs Lieutenant-General Ko Ko told parliament that the authorities were “tightening the regulations [against Rohingya] in order to handle travelling, birth, death, immigration, migration, marriage, construction of new religious buildings, repairing and land ownership and right to construct building [sic] of Bengalis [Rohingya] under the law.”

The policies explained in this report appear to be designed to make life so intolerable for Rohingya that they will leave the country, and indeed many have. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, and elsewhere over the last two decades, in many cases risking death at sea and abuses by human traffickers, including killings and ill treatment.

This report supports a prima facie finding that Rohingya are victims of the crime against humanity of persecution, and it implicates Myanmar government officials as perpetrators of that crime.

Currently, no competent legal system has jurisdiction over the grave crimes underway in Rakhine State. To analyze these serious offenses in the framework of international criminal law, this report looks to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and examines the actions of the government of Myanmar with respect to Rohingya and considers their severe impact on Rohingya human rights.

Through discriminatory policies exposed in this report, the government of Myanmar intentionally strips Rohingya of fundamental rights, simply because they are Rohingya. Policies target Rohingya on the basis of their ethnicity, religion, and at times gender. The resulting deprivation is so severe as to include widespread displacement, endemic maternal mortality, and statelessness, among other serious consequences.

The Rome Statute requires that certain elements be fulfilled in order for criminal acts to rise to the threshold of crimes against humanity. In Rakhine State, each of the necessary pieces appears to be in place. There is an ongoing “attack”—which need not involve violent force— against Rohingya, stemming from state policy, thus satisfying the criteria established by the Rome Statute. The attack appears both “widespread” and “systematic,” exceeding the statutory requirement that it be one or the other. Additionally, government officials have demonstrated their knowledge of the attack and of the ways their actions contribute to it, fulfilling the mental element for crimes against humanity.

The crime of persecution cannot be perpetrated in isolation under the Rome Statute; it must be committed “in connection with” another crime proscribed by the Statute. Over the past two decades, there have been numerous accounts of serious abuses perpetrated against the Rohingya population in northern Rakhine State, as documented by United Nations officials and human rights organizations, including rape, torture, killings, and forced population transfers. These incidents are clearly connected to the discriminatory and persecutory policies described in this report and some could likely support a finding that the crime of persecution is underway in northern Rakhine State.

The current government of Myanmar has made public and private commitments to prevent further outbreaks of violence in Rakhine State and to improve the plight of Rohingya in Myanmar, but it has failed to act decisively. Likewise, members of the international community have paid considerable attention to the acts of violence and forced displacement in Rakhine State since June 2012, but have failed to address adequately the devastating
systematic abuses perpetrated against the Rohingya on a daily basis.

State policies of persecution against Rohingya remain under enforcement in northern Rakhine State and should be abolished without delay.

http://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Policies_of_Persecution_Feb_25_Fortify_Rights.pdf