Web Desk(September 19, 2018): The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor announced on Tuesday the start of a preliminary examination into the recent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar to Bangladesh.
The announcement comes a day after U.N. investigators accused the Myanmar military of committing atrocities against the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities and calling for Myanmar’s top generals to be charged with genocide.
“I have decided to proceed to the next phase of the process and to carry out a full-fledged preliminary examination of the situation at hand,” ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in a statement. “This is the least that we owe to the victims.”
More than 700,000 Rohingya, a persecuted and mostly stateless Muslim minority from Myanmar’s western Rakhine state, have fled over the border into Bangladesh since August last year. Following attacks by Rohingya militants on security outposts, the military launched a brutal crackdown that refugees described as a campaign of arson, rape, and murder.
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