UN: Suu Kyi May Face Genocide Charges Over Rohingya Crisis

The United Nations’ top human rights official has raised the prospect of Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi facing charges over the deaths and expulsion of thousands of Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State.

The UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, says he would not be surprised if a future court found the military campaign against the Rohingya people amounted to genocide, ABC News reported.

The UN has previously described the deaths and displacement of the Rohingya people as a text book example of ethnic cleansing.

Earlier this month the human rights chief called for a criminal investigation.

But now Zeid says he cannot rule out the possibility of military and government leaders facing charges of genocide.

“The gravity and the scale would suggest a commission of a crime that requires a response by the international community,” he told the BBC.

“The question of intentionality going back to the genocidal acts ... it’s very hard to establish that because the thresholds are high. And that’s why we continue to say that a court has to do this. But it wouldn’t surprise me in the future if a court were to make such a finding on the basis of what we’re seeing.

“Because of the organization and planning that seems to have gone into this. We can infer that from the actions on the ground,” He said.

Zeid said he personally warned Suu Kyi to stop the killings in a phone call earlier this year. But regrettably nothing happened.

“She said ‘this is awful, certainly we want to look at it’,” he said., adding that “But then a couple days after that they began to question the methodology we had chosen. They began to question whether the facts were correct.”