Visiting International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Karim Asad Ahmad Khan said in Dhaka on Friday that they would accelerate the investigation and keep gathering more ‘truthful’ and ‘reliable’ evidence to bring the perpetrators in Myanmar to book for crimes committed against the Rohingya community.
The ICC chief prosecutor said he came in the past year and would come next year seeking additional resources to build the case ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.
He acknowledged the need for accelerating the investigation, and said, ‘The case is complex, but I think we have to do better.’
‘We are looking at the case to see a number of acts that seemed to be criminal in nature. We are focusing now on, firstly, completing that and looking at the linkage (to see) who is responsible for that,’ the prosecutor said, adding that they require a lot of evidence.
‘I do not want to bring a case that claps in court…’ the prosecutor told a press conference at a hotel in the capital.
‘I want to be transparent as much as possible within the limit of my ethical responsibility.’
He said that they want to prove that international law is not a mere idea for academics, judges in gowns, and prosecutors in robes in The Hague. Instead, it must be felt.
‘If justice is not felt by the people in the camps of Sudan [ Darfur] or Kutupalang camps, or DRC [ Democratic Republic of Congo] then who will [accept] in the law? We have to prove the idea and values we try to protect,’ he said.
He said that they were looking for the basic standard to prove crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide, and if they did not get enough access, they would explore every avenue to find evidence that was ‘truthful’, reliable, and relevant to the investigation they were carrying out.
‘…because you have a state that is not cooperative. It’s not impossible but difficult,’ he said about his access to Myanmar.
He argued that the ICC could access Ukraine and issue warrants within a year, but they could not do the same with the Myanmar case.
Asked about the increasing number of killings inside the camps, he said that protecting Rohingya refugees in the camps was not his mandate, as the United Nations and Bangladeshi authorities were there to do that.
The ICC, based in The Hague, authorised in November 2019 a petition from the prosecutor’s office to investigate the alleged crimes committed against the Rohingyas by the Myanmar army.
On Thursday, he led an ICC delegation that spoke separately to several Rohingya victims and witnesses in Camp 1 and Camp 12 as part of their investigation into the case.
Myanmar is not a member of the Rome Statute, a treaty that established the ICC. So the court would not have jurisdiction in the Asian country.
However, judges authorised the investigation because it was alleged that at least part of the crimes were committed in Bangladesh, one of the 122 member countries of the Rome Statute, which recognises the jurisdiction of the ICC created in 2002.
Nearly 7,74, 000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh since August 25, 2017, following a wave of persecution and violence in Myanmar that the UN has described as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing and possible genocide.
The ICC prosecutor expressed his concerns over ration cuts for Rohingyas and called on the international community to respond.
He said that now a Rohingya individual was given Tk 9 a day for a meal when the cost of a single egg was Tk 12.
