Guest contributor
Salai Za Uk Ling
Over the past several days in Geneva, my colleagues and I from the Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO) have engaged with the Human Rights Council, the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), diplomatic missions, international human rights organizations and faith-based partners.
Throughout these discussions, we have tried to bring attention back to the experiences of people who rarely have the opportunity to speak directly in these international spaces, including communities living through continuing airstrikes, displacement, sexual violence, attacks on religious freedom and enforced disappearance.
As I listened to the Enhanced Interactive Dialogue on Myanmar and reflected on our discussions throughout the week, I kept returning to a question I raised at an earlier session of the Council: after everything we have witnessed, and after all the brutality, suffering and inhumanity that have been documented, what is still preventing us from translating what our human conscience tells us into action?
The question is becoming more urgent because accountability and political normalisation are moving in opposite directions. Evidence of serious international crimes is becoming stronger and more specific, while the military leadership is simultaneously seeking greater diplomatic acceptance and international legitimacy.
Min Aung Hlaing is travelling abroad more frequently, including his state visit to Cambodia this week. The military continues to demand restoration of its political participation in ASEAN and recognition of its claim to represent Myanmar internationally.
The danger is that, if it can withstand international pressure for long enough and gradually rebuild diplomatic relationships, the passage of time itself may become an instrument of impunity.
When consequences are portrayed as injustice
The response of Myanmar’s Permanent Mission in Geneva to this week’s Enhanced Interactive Dialogue was revealing. Once again, it complained about Myanmar being discussed without the participation of what it described as the “country concerned”, while rejecting the legitimacy and findings of the IIMM.
Similar complaints have repeatedly been made about restrictions on the military’s representation within ASEAN and other international forums. What is consistently missing is acknowledgement of why those restrictions arose.
The military seized power from an elected government in 2021 and subsequently used extraordinary violence against those who opposed its rule.
It has repeatedly failed to implement the ASEAN Five-Point Consensus and continues to reject international accountability mechanisms investigating allegations of serious international crimes.
Its international isolation did not occur without cause. It followed its own actions.
Yet the military increasingly seeks to separate the consequence from the cause. Restrictions on its representation are presented as unfair treatment, while the conduct that produced those restrictions disappears from the argument.
This is one of the most corrosive effects of prolonged impunity. If meaningful consequences are delayed for long enough, those responsible can eventually portray accountability itself as an injustice.
Geneva has issued a clear warning
This is why the warning delivered by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk this week was so important.
He cautioned against normalising relations with Myanmar’s military without evidence that they are complying with their fundamental obligations under international law, warning that such normalisation could fuel further violence and violations.
He also made clear that the international response requires more than what has been described as “calibrated engagement”. Engagement must instead be anchored in human rights, civilian protection, measurable benchmarks and accountability. Importantly, he called for the full situation in Myanmar to be referred to the International Criminal Court.
At the same dialogue, IIMM Head Nicholas Koumjian demonstrated why that warning is grounded in increasingly concrete evidence. He reported that serious international crimes are being committed with greater frequency and intensity.
The IIMM has identified military units involved in aerial attacks and the airbases from which they operate, while investigations into torture have identified commanders and interrogators in military-run detention facilities.
The significance of this progress should not be underestimated. International investigators are moving beyond establishing patterns of violations towards identifying structures and individuals potentially responsible for them.
Yet, at precisely the moment when evidence capable of supporting criminal accountability is becoming more specific, political normalisation is also gathering pace.
International justice is already years behind the victims
The International Criminal Court illustrates how far accountability has fallen behind events.
In November 2024, the ICC Prosecutor applied for an arrest warrant against Min Aung Hlaing for alleged crimes against humanity involving the deportation and persecution of the Rohingya. Justice for the Rohingya remains essential and long overdue.
However, we should confront the chronology honestly. The crimes underlying that application relate to atrocities beginning in 2017, several years before the coup.
While international criminal justice is still struggling to deliver accountability for those crimes, an enormous additional body of alleged international crimes has accumulated across Myanmar since 2021.
For more than five years, communities have endured aerial attacks, village burnings, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence, attacks on religious communities and massive displacement.
The people waiting for justice are doing so while simultaneously trying to survive continuing and, in many places, increasing violence.
The Rohingya experience should therefore serve as a warning for the whole country. When serious international crimes remain without meaningful consequences, impunity becomes entrenched and perpetrators gain confidence.
The failure to achieve accountability for earlier atrocities did not prevent further violence. Instead, the same military subsequently seized power and inflicted enormous suffering upon communities across Myanmar.
We should not allow another generation of victims to spend years waiting for international justice to catch up.
The ICC should act while action can still make a difference
Judicial independence must be respected, and ICC judges must determine the Prosecutor’s application according to the evidence and the Rome Statute.
Respect for judicial independence, however, does not require us to pretend that time has no practical consequences.
The application was submitted in November 2024, and no decision has yet been publicly announced. Meanwhile, Min Aung Hlaing is travelling and rebuilding political relationships.
His state visit to Cambodia this week makes the issue particularly relevant because Cambodia is a State Party to the Rome Statute.
There is presently no publicly known ICC warrant for Cambodia to execute, and that legal distinction must be respected.
Nevertheless, his presence in an ICC member state demonstrates why timing matters.
If the Pre-Trial Chamber is in a position to determine the Prosecutor’s application, it should do so without further avoidable delay.
If the requirements of the Rome Statute are satisfied, there is also a compelling case for making any warrant public so that future opportunities for lawful enforcement are not unnecessarily lost.
This is not an argument for compromising due process. It is an acknowledgement that justice has a temporal dimension.
A legally sound decision delivered only after practical opportunities for enforcement have passed may retain legal significance, but its capacity to constrain impunity will inevitably be diminished.
Evidence cannot prosecute itself
This question of how evidence becomes consequence was at the heart of CHRO’s side event during this Human Rights Council session.
We brought together different dimensions of Myanmar’s crisis, including aerial attacks, conflict-related sexual violence, attacks on freedom of religion or belief and enforced disappearance.
Although these violations take different forms, they are connected by the persistence of impunity.
For those of us who have documented violations in Myanmar for decades, the pattern is painfully familiar.
Survivors testify, civil society documents and verifies, international mechanisms preserve evidence, governments condemn what has happened and resolutions are adopted.
When these processes repeatedly fail to produce meaningful consequences, however, perpetrators have little reason to believe that the next violation will produce a different result.
Myanmar does not suffer from a lack of evidence. It suffers from a persistent failure to enforce international law.
Our discussions with the leadership of the IIMM this week reinforced how indispensable its work is. However, evidence cannot prosecute itself.
Eventually, prosecutors, courts and governments must convert evidence into legal consequences.
This is also why universal jurisdiction matters. The legal initiatives CHRO has pursued in the Philippines and Timor-Leste are not alternatives to the ICC or IIMM, but complementary attempts to test additional pathways where justice remains blocked inside Myanmar.
No single institution will be capable of addressing the enormous range of alleged international crimes committed in the country.
If justice is obstructed inside Myanmar, those responsible should never be able to assume that it is therefore unavailable everywhere.
ASEAN must not allow non-compliance to become a successful strategy
Our discussions with some of the ASEAN permanent missions in Geneva also brought us back to the relationship between diplomacy and accountability.
For years, ASEAN has maintained that progress depends upon implementation of its Five-Point Consensus.
Yet the military has failed to implement its central commitments while repeatedly demanding restoration of its full political participation.
If those privileges are gradually restored without measurable changes in conduct, ASEAN risks demonstrating that its own conditions can simply be outlasted.
As the Philippines leads ASEAN towards its November summit in Manila, progress should therefore be measured not by the number or level of meetings that take place, but by whether those engagements produce meaningful changes for Myanmar’s people.
Are civilians safer? Are aerial attacks decreasing? Is humanitarian assistance reaching those who need it? Are political prisoners being released? Is inclusive political dialogue possible? Is accountability advancing?
Diplomacy and accountability should not be treated as opposing choices. Diplomacy without credible consequences has repeatedly failed to change the military’s calculations.
Accountability can strengthen diplomacy precisely because it changes the cost of continued violations.
The same principle should guide decisions concerning Myanmar’s representation at the United Nations.
International procedure should not confer the legitimacy that the military has failed to obtain through the democratic consent of Myanmar’s people.
What are we still waiting for?
After a week of engagements in Geneva, I remain encouraged that Myanmar has not disappeared from the international agenda. There are committed diplomats, investigators, human rights defenders and international institutions continuing to work for Myanmar’s people.
But concern alone is no longer enough.
There is a direct relationship between delay and impunity. When accountability is delayed, perpetrators have less reason to change their behaviour.
When violations continue without meaningful consequences, political rehabilitation becomes easier with the passage of time. As normalisation advances, accountability becomes progressively more difficult.
The people of Myanmar are being asked to wait for justice while simultaneously trying to survive continuing violence.
Meanwhile, those responsible for that violence are discovering that time may provide them with a route back towards international acceptance.
Civil society will continue to document violations, preserve evidence, accompany survivors and pursue every credible legal avenue available.
We can bring evidence to Geneva, pursue legal avenues in Manila and Dili, and continue knocking on the doors of international institutions. But eventually, someone on the other side of those doors has to open them.
That is why the question I raised previously at the Human Rights Council feels even more relevant today: after everything we have witnessed, what is still preventing us from translating what our human conscience tells us into action?
The military leadership is clearly trying to use the passage of time to move closer to international legitimacy.
The international community must not allow that same passage of time to move justice further beyond the reach of Myanmar’s people.
Salai Za Uk Ling is the Executive Director of Chin Human Rights Organization.
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