Fortify Rights urges UK to lead coalition referring Myanmar to ICC

Mizzima

Fortify Rights on 29 June called on the United Kingdom (UK) to lead a coalition of states in referring the full situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court (ICC) under Article 14 of the Rome Statute. The rights group also urged new targeted sanctions on the Myanmar military and increased aid for refugees and displaced people, following testimony to the UK House of Commons International Development Committee on 23 June by Fortify Rights Chief Executive Officer Matthew Smith.

“The U.K. can take a practical step right now to help prevent further atrocities in Myanmar by leading a coalition of ICC member states to refer the full situation in Myanmar to the ICC Prosecutor,” Smith said, adding that the Myanmar military should be denied “the money, weapons, aviation fuel, and impunity it needs to continue committing atrocities.”

Smith testified alongside Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, and Kate Ferguson, Co-Executive Director of Protection Approaches, according to Fortify Rights. The organisation said no member of the Myanmar military has faced trial before the ICC or another prosecuting body for atrocity crimes despite extensive documentation by human rights organisations, including its own documentation of what it has described as genocide against the Rohingya and war crimes and crimes against humanity against civilians nationwide.

Fortify Rights said the U.K. should not wait for consensus at the U.N. Security Council, where Russia and China have shielded the Myanmar military from accountability, and should instead convene ICC States Parties across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. The organisation pointed to the response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when 43 ICC States Parties referred the situation to the court within weeks, as a model the U.K. helped build and should now replicate for Myanmar.

According to Fortify Rights, Conservative MP and former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt asked in a House of Commons debate on 10 June whether the government would consider invoking Article 14 to request an ICC investigation into Myanmar. Former U.N. Special Rapporteur on Myanmar Tom Andrews had separately recommended an Article 14 referral in a March 2024 report to the U.N. Human Rights Council and repeated the call in his final accountability report on 27 April 2026, Fortify Rights said.

Myanmar’s National Unity Government lodged a declaration in July 2021 accepting the ICC’s jurisdiction over crimes committed in the country since 2002, which the ICC confirmed receiving in February 2022. Fortify Rights said this declaration gives ICC member states a basis to refer Myanmar’s situation to the court, and that it is the court’s role, not member states’, to determine the declaration’s validity. The ICC has not opened a full investigation into ongoing atrocity crimes across Myanmar, though it is investigating crimes related to the forced deportation of Rohingya to Bangladesh in 2017, and the International Court of Justice is separately hearing a genocide case against Myanmar brought by The Gambia, in which the U.K. has intervened in support of The Gambia’s claims.

Fortify Rights also called on the U.K. to impose new sanctions targeting military-controlled state-owned banks, suppliers of aviation fuel and arms to the Myanmar military, and military-linked businesses including telecommunications and natural-resource entities, coordinated with the European Union, United States, Canada, and Australia. It urged the U.K. to push at the Security Council for a global arms embargo and a ban on aviation fuel transfers to the military, regardless of the likelihood of a Russian or Chinese veto.

The organisation said the U.K.’s Myanmar policy should also address abuses by non-state armed groups, noting that Rohingya civilians in Rakhine State have faced restrictions on movement, denial of humanitarian access, arbitrary detention, and attacks on civilians by the Arakan Army as well as by the Myanmar military.

On humanitarian assistance, Fortify Rights said recent aid cuts have reduced food assistance, worsened malnutrition, and increased risks of trafficking and dangerous sea journeys for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, increasing pressure on them to undertake unsafe returns to Myanmar. “For Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, humanitarian aid is atrocity prevention,” Smith said in his testimony. The organisation called on the U.K. to publicly oppose forced or premature returns and to increase flexible, multi-year funding for human rights defenders and documentation groups supporting accountability mechanisms, including the ICC and the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar.

Myanmar is home to the world’s longest-running civil war, according to Fortify Rights, which said approximately 3.7 million people are currently internally displaced in the country, while 5.3 million people from Myanmar are displaced overall.