The ICC must give justice to Myanmar or face irrelevance

It is over a year since Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court prosecutor and British KC, announced that he had requested a warrant for the arrest of Myanmar dictator, Min Aung Hlaing, for “crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution”.

- CHRISTOPHER GUNNESS

Khan’s announcement was already a full seven years after the “clearance operations” in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, the worst mass violence in Southeast Asia since Pol Pot’s reign of terror in 1970s Cambodia, and which the US designated a “genocide” against the Rohingya people: industrial-scale slaughter, gang rape and systematic arson attacks against entire villages, which drove 750,000 people into Bangladesh.

Yet the anniversary of Khan’s request came and went without the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber 1, the body charged with considering it, issuing a warrant, or even making a pronouncement on the matter. Such a delay is unprecedented in the history of the court and compounds a growing sense that the ICC is failing to abide by the commitments of its founding statute: “the effective prosecution” of perpetrators and an end to impunity for “international crimes”.