Executive Summary In August 2017, the armed forces of Myanmar (Tatmadaw) unleashed a campaign of widespread and systematic attacks on the country’s Rohingya communities, escalating previous episodes of violent human rights abuses committed against the Rohingya population. The United Nations (UN) and multiple human rights groups documented that Myanmar security forces committed rape, gang rape, […]

Two years ago, the government of Myanmar unleashed a scorched-earth campaign against the Rohingya Muslims. Impunity prevails for these atrocities, which are only the most recent in the long story of the Rohingya’s persecution in Myanmar. When will the Rohingya see justice done?

The COVID-19 pandemic has left no community unscathed. In some countries, health workers face personal protective equipment shortages; in others, governments actively exploit the pandemic to restrict rights to freedom of speech or assembly and suppress access to information about COVID-19. But even in this challenging context, the pursuit of justice for some of the […]

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) welcomes the adoption of UN Human Rights Council resolution L.23 on the situation of human rights in Myanmar. As an organization that has used science and medicine to document and prevent human rights abuses in Myanmar for more than 15 years – finding evidence of widespread and systematic violence targeting […]

Health workers on the ground in the overcrowded refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where an estimated 855,000 Rohingya refugees currently reside, have been waiting anxiously for weeks for their turn to come. On June 2, the news finally broke: the first death from COVID-19 was recorded in the refugee camps and at least 29 […]

COVID-19 has come to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh   Health authorities confirmed on March 24 the first case of COVID-19 in Cox’s Bazar, adjacent to the teeming refugee camps where more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees have taken shelter since fleeing a campaign of widespread and systematic violence perpetrated by Myanmar security forces in late 2017.   […]

Last week, the government of Myanmar started paying a real price for its failure to provide meaningful accountability for its security forces’ widespread and systematic violence against the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority in northern Rakhine state in late 2017. Literally. On February 26, Germany’s development minister, Gerd Müller, announced that Berlin was suspending development cooperation with Myanmar because of […]

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) welcomes the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) decision today to support The Gambia’s request that the government of Myanmar take all necessary actions to protect the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority. This is the ICJ’s first official response to The Gambia’s official complaint of Myanmar’s violations of the United Nations’ 1948 Genocide Convention, linked […]

This post originally appeared in the Asia Times In its Cox’s Bazar refugee camps, Bangladesh has generously provided a modicum of safety and dignity to the Rohingya refugee survivors of the Myanmar military campaign of widespread and systematic violence in late 2017. But the durability of that safety and dignity is now in doubt. Last week, the Bangladeshi […]

Sunday marks the two-year anniversary of the start of a widespread and systematic campaign of mass killings, torture, mutilations and sexual violence by Myanmar security forces targeting the Muslim Rohingya ethnic minority in northern Rakhine province. That violence resulted in the torching of hundreds of Rohingya villages, killed at least 10,000 Rohingya civilians and prompted […]

This post originally appeared in the Asia Times. The government of Myanmar reached out late last month to the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who have taken refuge in the Bangladeshi city of Cox’s Bazar with a seemingly straightforward plea: “Come back home.” That offer might have seemed irresistible for those familiar with conditions in the teeming […]

In August 2017, Myanmar security forces and Rakhine Buddhist civilians attacked hundreds of villages in northern Rakhine state, massacring thousands of Rohingya Muslim residents and burning their homes to the ground.

This post originally appeared in the Asia Times “Trust us.” That’s the implicit message in the Myanmar military’s announcement this week of the creation of an “investigation court” to probe the state-backed mass violence targeted at the country’s Muslim Rohingya population in August 2017. The announcement on the website of the Office of the Commander in […]

NEW YORK – This week, The Lancet Planetary Health, a leading scientific journal focused on policy action for planetary health, published the complete findings of a quantitative survey conducted by Physicians for Human Rights. The survey documented the scale and scope of attacks against the Rohingya in August 2017, which led more than 720,000 people […]

UN Special Rapporteur to Myanmar Yanghee Lee will visit Bangladesh on January 19 to assess the conditions of the more than 920,000 Rohingya who have sought refuge there following widespread and systematic violence in Myanmar. Lee is tasked with assessing the human rights situation in Myanmar but has been blocked on several occasions by the […]

New York, NY Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is very much encouraged by today’s overwhelming vote to adopt resolution A/HRC/39/L.22 on Myanmar by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva paving the way for accountability for atrocities committed against the Rohingya people. “The resolution, which creates an international mechanism to help prepare case files for […]

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is encouraged by the release of a report by the U.S. State Department on the atrocities committed by Myanmar against the Rohingya Muslims of Rakhine state and hopes the findings will be used to unequivocally condemn Myanmar’s military leaders and to support an international mechanism for securing justice. The report, […]

In the final weeks before the massive 2017 Rohingya exodus from Myanmar, reports indicate that the vast majority of Rohingya settlements suffered violence, often extreme, at the hands of Myanmar security forces and civilians. As part of a large-scale and unique research effort to determine the scope, scale, and patterns of these attacks, Physicians for […]

PHR has been shining a spotlight on human rights violations in Myanmar for more than 15 years. On February 1, 2021, the Myanmar armed forces (known as the Tatmadaw) seized control of the country, following a general election that the National League for Democracy party won by a landslide. Since that time, hundreds of people, […]

Executive Summary On August 27, 2017, Myanmar security forces and Rakhine Buddhist civilians attacked the village of Chut Pyin in northern Rakhine state, massacring its Rohingya Muslim residents and burning their homes to the ground. The attackers perpetrated a vast array of human rights violations on the Rohingya villagers, including killings, disappearances, beatings, stabbings, rape, […]

Children with gunshot wounds, severe burns, traumatic injuries – these are just some of the atrocities PHR’s team of doctors documented on their recent trip to Bangladesh, where nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled to escape a campaign of brutal violence by the Myanmar military. “The thing that really strikes me is that … we’re seeing […]

Rohingya women wait to be seen at the Hope Foundation clinic outside Balukhali camp in Bangladesh, which treats many of the nearly 700,000 Rohingya refugees who have fled extreme violence in Myanmar. Photo: Salahuddin Ahmed for Physicians for Human Rights. Every day is a busy day at the Hope Foundation clinic outside Balukhali camp in […]

PHR documented the wounds of this Rohingya man at Balukhali refugee camp in Bangladesh. He was shot from behind by the Myanmar military while fleeing his village. Photo: Salahuddin Ahmed for Physicians for Human Rights I’ve never met so many survivors of gunshots in a single place before. They’re not hard to find in the […]

One Rohingya man suffered a compound fracture in his leg when he was savagely beaten by Myanmar security forces. A 5-year-old girl was flung against a wall with such force that, two months later, she still can’t walk. A young woman was struck over the head with a machete and then left to die in […]

Minority groups living in Myanmar have faced profound and pervasive human rights violations for decades. This report documents widespread abuse by military and security forces in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, including detentions, extortion, beatings, raids, and restrictions on movement targeting the mostly Muslim Rohingya minority. It concludes that the Rohingya face such a systematic denial of […]