Thank you for joining us here at the UN office at Geneva for this prequel to our regular briefing.
I'm very pleased to introduce to you Mr Nicholas Kumjian.
Many of you know Mr Kumjian, who's the head of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, otherwise known as the Double I, Double M, which as you know was created by the Human Rights Council in 2018.
Mr Kumjian has been serving as head of this, an important body since 2019 to investigate serious international crimes committed in Myanmar since 2011.
So Mr Kumjiang's here and we thank him again for being here to speak to the report which is being launched today from the double IM, Double I, Double M So over to you, Mr Kumjiang.
As today we're launching our 7th annual report reporting on the work that we're doing, the direction and progress.
And of course, that work involves collecting evidence of the most serious international crimes in Myanmar and then analysing it and sharing our products with national authorities or international courts able and willing to prosecute those cases.
To date, we've collected evidence from more than 1300 sources, including from over 600 eyewitnesses.
Along with these testimonies, we've collected photographs, videos, documents, maps, a lot of material from the Internet, from social media and various types of forensic evidence.
And this has allowed us to make some progress in documenting crimes that are occurring and in some cases, in identifying those responsible for the crimes.
The crimes that we've seen, unfortunately we've seen if anything, an increase in the crimes that are occurring and these include crimes committed against those in detention.
And many of those in detention are appear to be detained without due process, without fundamental due process, which itself is an international crime.
We've documented torture against those in detention, including beatings and electric shocks, strangulations, pulling out fingernails, gang rape, burning of sexual body parts and other forms of sexual violence.
We've also seen evidence that children have been detained, children even as young as two years old, often sometimes as proxies for their parents who the regime could not get a hold of.
And some of the children have been subjected to torture or real treatment.
We've also seen summary executions committed by different parties to the conflict in Myanmar.
As you know, this is a very multifaceted conflict and there are many different armed groups.
And we've seen evidence, including posts on social media that that depict executions of captured fighters from one side or the other.
And this is the kind of evidence that we preserve and we use to identify perpetrators and we believe would be very important in some eventual, we hope, judicial process to hold those responsible to account.
One area that we're particularly concerned about is aerial bombings.
And the aerial bombings, of course, are committed only by one party, which has.
The only party that has the ability to carry out airstrikes in Myanmar is the Myanmar military, the current Hunter ruling the country.
And we've seen an increase in civilian airstrikes.
Even after the earthquake occurred, we saw that airstrikes continued.
The targets of the airstrikes are often blatantly civilian targets.
Schools have been hit, homes, hospitals, ID camps, places of worship often there's no military target that we can identify anywhere in the area that could have been the intent of the air strike.
Just in the last three months, in between May and July, we saw an air strike on a NUG managed hospital in Tavian Township in Sagai where 24 were killed, at least 24 including 22 students and two of their teachers and more than 100 injured.
We saw a strike in July on a Buddhist monastery in another lit village in Sagai Township, Lintalu village, at least 22 killed.
We saw an air strike on a hospital in Kanbalu Township in Sagai where 15 were killed.
Another air strike on Lehtanla village in Singhu Township, Mandalay, where 24 were killed, that was at a, you know, police station was hit where many of these people were being detained.
So we're working hard to identify how these air strikes are ordered, who are the people in the chain of command, who are those that are flying the planes?
And of course, a lot of our efforts go into continuing to investigate what happened to the Rohingya and particularly the clearance operations of 2017.
But we've also seen Rakhine State has become an area where there are ongoing crimes against all communities that reside there.
And we, of course, will collect evidence, any evidence that shows a serious international crime, regardless of who the perpetrators are or who the victims are.
And unfortunately, we're seeing crimes committed by all sides.
I will be travelling to Bangladesh, to Cox's Mazar for the, unfortunately, the 8th anniversary.
I don't know a better word to you.
The 8th year after the clearance operations.
I think the government of Bangladesh, I'm grateful to them.
They're hosting a dialogue of stakeholders and this is in preparation for the 30th of September event in New York, the high level event where the Rohingya crisis will be addressed.
There's over 1,000,000 Rohingya refugees now in Bangladesh, people displaced forcibly from their homes.
And there's a belief, an understandable belief, it's time to do do something about it.
Be happy to answer your questions.
Thank you very much, Mr Kumjian.
OK, over to your colleagues for questions.
We'll start off with Emma of Reuters.
I would like to know more about the scale of the torture in detention centres.
Can you give an idea of in how many centres this is happening and roughly how many victims there?
There have been even ballpark and a question on the perpetrators.
You say you've identified them.
Obviously, you don't want to name them publicly at this stage for reasons I can guess.
But how much hope do you have for for justice for those torturers given I think that most jurisdictions I believe are focused on the Rohingya crimes?
Well, unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to give you much of an answer on the scale of the torture because we know we only see, we only scratch the surface.
We only are able in some occasions to speak to some people who've been in detention and have been released or others who for some reason were able to witness the events.
But from talking to those who've been detained, what we can say I don't believe with confidence is that torture is common.
For example, on sexual violence.
My own impression is that at the very least, women are routinely subjected to the threat, the psychological threat of sexual violence.
Many also are are subjected to body searches that are very, very intrusive and that appear to be designed to harass or humiliate the women involved.
And we've seen very serious torture of detainees with various different methods that that were involved.
And I would say torture actually, I've told my team this is an area that we should put a lot of effort into because I think it is one area where we're more likely to be able to collect evidence identifying A perpetrator to the standards needed to convict someone in court.
People know, often they know the names or the certain or the faces of those who tortured them or tortured their friends.
It's also very common not or not so difficult for us to determine who is the commander of the detention centre.
The detainees often know it, but of course there's also other types of records that show that.
So investigating those who instances of torture is something that I think can be fruitful eventually in proving criminal cases.
Thank you very much, Robin.
What about the the patterns of abuse that you're seeing?
I'm just wondering if you've noticed any changes over time in, in the patterns of abuses, whether certain abuses are more prevalent now than they were before or, or how things have changed.
And then, and then secondly on, on other countries, are other countries to some degree fuelling this or creating the conditions for this to happen?
And, and secondly, have you identified countries which would be willing to prosecute these crimes if you could, if you would furnish the evidence?
I should write these questions down, but the first question was about the patterns.
Yes, you know that's difficult to say.
11 obvious pattern that we've seen is an increasing use of air power by the regime and that seemed to be tie into their loss of territories.
As they lost territories, they seem to be utilising the bombing more frequently and just indiscriminately targeting or perhaps even intentionally targeting civilian areas with with the air strikes.
And the other thing that may be related to that is we have seen some evidence of a reluctance of the some of the military fighters to actually engage in combat.
And air strikes are one of the easier ways for them to attack their enemies when they don't have the ability to or they find it more difficult to go on the offensive against enemies.
As far as looking at other countries or those who are fueling the conflict, we do have a unit that we've established after the coup occurred that is investigating the financial aspect of crimes.
And they're looking at things like who is supplying equipment, ammunition, et cetera, that could be fueling the conflict.
Also looking at who is benefiting from the conflict.
So, and one of the, for example, projects that they have related to the Rohingya is looking at what's happened to the land of the Rohingya that when they were pushed off their villages.
What's happened to the villages now, who's profiting it by it?
We've seen in many, many instances, Rohingya village just burnt, bulldozed, and now there's a military base or police station built on top of it.
So these are some of the things we're looking at.
So we are definitely interested in anyone, whether they're inside or outside the country, that could be fueling, knowingly fueling crimes.
We're also always trying to be aware of where there could be a jurisdiction able and willing to exercise a jurisdiction over these crimes.
The laws differ from country to country.
So you do have a country like Argentina, which is a bit of an outlier in that it allows pure universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity without any tie to Argentina at all.
So the case that they're investigating there about the Rohingya, the complaintants are Rohingya, but from the UK and Bangladesh.
There's no tie to Argentina.
But the Argentine appeals court said under their constitution, crimes against humanity have to be investigated.
But we know there's in many of the jurisdictions, for example, in Europe, often they require some tie to the country, such as the perpetrator being on their territory or at least the victim being the national.
We do have evidence of nationals of Western countries being victims of these crimes, particularly crimes in detention.
So we do have some hopes that these cases will be prosecuted.
And we speak often to judicial authorities from different countries.
At the moment we're only sharing with three Rohingya related cases, Argentina, ICJICC, but we also are sharing information with the United Kingdom authorities which have a more structural investigation, a preliminary investigation.
Thank you very much for the questions in the room.
We'll turn online in that case.
So Laurent 0, Swiss news Agency.
Thank you for the press conference.
First, could you talk a little bit about the opposition armed groups as well, the pattern you might have identify from from their side in terms of violations?
And then did you build a formal list of perpetrators that can be shared as well with the jurisdiction or is it just raw material cause yeah, usually some of the investigative bodies they do that.
And if so, I yeah, I assume you won't give many details about that list, but roughly how many names would be on that list?
Well, in regards to, let me see, what was the first question.
Yes, the armed opposition groups.
You know, unfortunately we've seen probably an increase in evidence that opposition groups have committed crimes.
And, you know, we're interested in collecting evidence, regardless of what the politics is or the ethnicity or religion of either the perpetrator or the victim, if it rises to the level of a serious international crime.
But some of the evidence that I'm speaking about that we've seen, for example, is there have been some occasions where there's been videos posted on the Internet showing the execution of captured fighters.
Sometimes they're captured military fighters executed by different armed groups.
And one of the things we've done quite frequently is to send requests for information for different to different parties, asking them for information they have about crimes against their own people or their own troops, but also about crimes that they we have evidence they may have committed.
So we spent sent, I don't know how many, but there's certainly more than a dozen to the Myanmar military, probably a couple dozen to the Myanmar military.
And we've never, and we started this before the coup and we've never gotten any responses from them on that.
But we've also sent it to different armed groups and opposition armed groups.
The only detailed response that we've gotten so far was from the NUG.
We asked them about a particular incident where there was reported killing by committed allegedly by PDF fighters and they sent us a quite detailed investigation they had done seeking to identify what happened and identify those fighters.
So we appreciate that and we'd like to see more groups cooperate with us.
I think one factor that people are often concerned about, and I read in the paper, I think this morning, a newspaper article where someone was talking about someone with a lot of experience in International Criminal law was talking about the Cambodia, Thailand conflict.
But saying that under the principle of command responsibility, commanders are responsible for the actions of their subordinates.
That's actually not correct.
And I think it's important to point it out because we're not saying and never have that any crime that's committed by an armed group, the leadership of that group is criminally responsible.
Commanders are responsible for their own actions.
If they fail in responsibilities that they have to prevent or punish crimes.
So we are interested, we do look at command responsibility, but that requires looking at what did the commander know, what concrete powers did they have to investigate or punish or to prevent a crime from happening.
And I think that's important to to point out because we want those at the higher levels of command to cooperate with us to realise it's their duty to make sure that these crimes, their forces don't commit these crimes.
If anything, I think we can help them if they cooperate with us.
Help them enforce these rules among their own troops, so then hopefully we deter some future crimes.
Well before we go back to you, Emma, we have a couple more online.
Thank you for coming to see us.
Wanted to ask sorry about this I.
So maybe you've answered this.
The Myanmar government been able to respond.
And what have they said about?
Well, depends on what you mean by the Myanmar government.
But if you're talking about the the current de facto military authorities, they do not respond to us.
The only way that they've engaged with us is on the ICJ case where they have given us certain promises about how they would treat any evidence that we share with the parties to that proceeding.
But this has been the position, this was also the position precu of the government before the coup.
They did not engage with us.
But as I didn't mention, the NUG has engaged with us regarding various matters, but including an investigation they did of crimes allegedly committed by their own soldiers.
Before we go back to, I think, Laurel, you have a follow up to your previous questions, if I'm honest.
Maybe I'll deal with that.
So we don't disclose at this point evidence that we have against perpetrators or names of perpetrators for various reasons.
First of all, I think this is the common practise in criminal investigations.
You don't want to tip people off during the investigation because that can mean you might lose evidence that they're able to hide from you, or you also may lose the opportunity to arrest.
Also, frankly, I think in these kinds of investigations, to be honest, we're only going to be able to touch the thousands and thousands of crimes that are occurring.
We're only going to be able to investigate a smaller portion of those crimes.
But I hope that every perpetrator of those crimes is concerned that their name is in our files and in our evidence.
And the truth is, of course, that we have various levels of evidence.
There is some is more advanced, some is more preliminary.
We'll share that at the right time when we have authorities able and willing to exercise jurisdiction over those cases.
And I don't think it would be wise for us to disclose names.
Also think there's an issue of fairness if we just disclose a name without giving someone where there's no opportunity to challenge that in a court.
So for all these reasons, the the names that we have of potential perpetrators, at least at this point, will remain confidential.
Did did you have a further comment or question but?
Yeah, single digit number, dozens of people, hundreds of people.
You know, it all depends on what you call what's the level of evidence that you were speaking about.
And we have an awful lot of evidence and an awful lot of names in our database, but I wouldn't want to give you a number of suspects.
I think this may need to be the last one because we're approaching the 10:30 mark, but go ahead, Emma.
I, I was hoping you could say a bit more about the financial challenges that you're facing.
How serious are these going to be going forward?
And are there any concrete examples of how they are impeding your work?
Yes, you know, these, these are tough times we know for for many different types of organisations and for the United Nations.
I think you're all aware the United Nations, because of the liquidity crisis, we've been told at this point that we can only spend 73 of the percent of the budget that was approved last year for this year.
So that severely restricts us.
We have been able in the past to raise some money, we'll call it XP fund, extra budgetary funds from various states that have contributed to some key work that wasn't part of our initial structure when we were established.
So that includes a unit that looks at the financial investigations, but also a unit that does open source investigations.
So important in today's world.
This is the 7th tribunal I've or investigative body that I've worked at in international law.
But it's so different from the others because it's more recent.
And even Rohingya, even though they were generally a poor people, we have thousands and thousands of videos that people took on their phones as their villages were being burned, as crimes were happening.
And so much information is on social media and on the Internet.
We've downloaded these videos of executions, a lot of those that always comes from our our open source unit.
We previously were able to raise funds for that, but those funds will run out at the end of this year if we don't get additional grants.
That open source unit that's been so fundamental to our work, we will have to close and dismiss those who were working in that section.
We also had a couple grants that we lost from a state that had previously given it to us and then cancelled the grants and that one of those related to witness security and so and and psychological well-being.
Another section that we had money for all previous years, but we don't have it beyond the end of this year is investigating sexual violence, gender crimes and crimes against children.
So that sections again, those sections, again, we have no money.
If we don't get new money, the four people that work in that section we won't be able to employ next year.
So all of this would have, I think, a very substantial effect on our ability to continue to document the crimes and provide evidence that will be useful to jurisdictions prosecuting these cases.
You couldn't say which which, which countries they they were.
I'm trying to get an idea of this is just, you know, political decisions to cut the funding or, or something else.
Well, we lost two of the three grants from the United States.
1 grant has continued and the other grants, you know, we only had them for a period of time.
Countries aren't cancelling them.
But what I'm saying is they haven't stepped up and said they will continue them and for some of them have sold us they cannot continue them next year.
So funding for these open source unit, the sexual crimes unit, the witness, security and psychological well-being is in danger if we don't raise additional money.
I think we'll have to draw it to a close there.
So thank you very much, Mr Kumjian.
And I note that, Joanne, I think the report is out now.
You should have it in your inboxes.
So do read that report on that.
And thank you again very much for spending this time with us, Mr Kumjian, and good luck.
