Myanmar junta chief faces ICC arrest warrant

The International Criminal Court has filed for an arrest warrant against the leader of Myanmar’s military government, Min Aung Hlaing, for what the court’s chief prosecutor said are crimes against the nation’s long-persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority.

In the court’s statement, issued on Wednesday, the prosecutor, Karim Khan, accuses the military leader of “criminal responsibility for the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya, committed in Myanmar, and in part in Bangladesh”.

The charges date back to 2016, when the military, along with police, border guards, and non-Rohingya civilians were accused of systematic killings of up to 10,000 Rohingya civilians, which the UN referred to as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

Those alleged atrocities, along with the decades-long persecution of the Muslim minority, have caused up to one million Rohingya to flee the country in the ensuing years.

Min Aung Hlaing and the junta’s armed forces, known as the Tatmadaw, have ruled over Myanmar since 2021. However, the previous government, headed by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, was also accused of trying to downplay or ignore the scale of the atrocities. In 2019, Suu Kyi defended Myanmar against accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice, the UN’s top court.

Khan’s request will need to be approved by ICC judges before it can be put into force. However, like Israel, whose prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was served an arrest warrant by the ICC this week, Myanmar is not a signatory to the Rome Statute.

Any of the 123 member states of the ICC would be obligated to hand Min Aung Hlaing over if he does step foot on their territory, but he rarely makes international trips beyond allies like China.

Read more about the abuses the ICC’s case is based upon – and about the abuses that are continuing to this day – on our special Rohingya in-depth page:

The Rohingya: The exodus isn’t over

The roots of anti-Rohingya violence; the emergency in Bangladesh’s refugee camps; and the worsening crises at home in Myanmar.