Guest contributor
James Shwe
Something real happened in Geneva this week, and it was not a speech about our suffering.
On September 7, opening the Human Rights Council’s 63rd session, U.N. High Commissioner Volker Türk urged member states to refer the full situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court (ICC) through the U.N. Security Council, and to end transfers of arms, ammunition, jet fuel and dual-use items.
His report documents intensified attacks, mass displacement and forced conscription. The IIMM reported alongside it. The European Union called accountability essential and condemned the drone strikes on civilians and hospitals; the U.K. said perpetrators must be held to account, noted its £900,000 to the Mechanism and its joint intervention at the ICJ.
From the region, the Khmer Movement for Democracy told the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) plainly that elections held while political prisoners sit in cells are “a mechanism for legitimizing military rule.”
The cumulative effect is measurable: the political price of treating Min Aung Hlaing’s post-election civilian costume as a government has gone up. That is the asset. The question is whether we spend it or admire it.
The trips buy hospitality, not legitimacy
Min Aung Hlaing has flown further in 18 months than in the four years after the coup — Moscow and Minsk in August, a state visit to Beijing in June, where Xi Jinping welcomed the election and pledged support.
It has produced red carpets and no rehabilitation: outside the Russia-Belarus-China triangle, no major power has moved to recognize the regime.
At the U.N. it cannot work, for a reason his own ministry supplies. Naypyidaw formally denounced the Human Rights Council’s country-specific reporting as failing to reflect “the actual situation on the ground.”
A delegation that rejects the findings of the institution whose seat it is claiming is asking that institution to overrule itself.
Which raises the two questions nobody in our advocacy asks out loud. Is China willing to pay the political price of forcing Myanmar’s seat — either handing it to Min Aung Hlaing’s ministers or emptying it — in the same session where the High Commissioner has asked for an ICC referral?
Beijing has had five years to force a vote and has never done it, preferring procedural deferral to open confrontation. And are the nine states on the U.N. Credentials Committee willing to carry that risk for a client not their own? Deferral has held because reopening the question costs more than it gains. Our job is to keep that arithmetic obvious.
It also helps to be precise about what the committee is. It does not decide anything. It examines credentials under Rules 27 and 28 and recommends; the U.N. General Assembly adopts its report — most recently by consensus on 12 December 2025, without a vote.
The plenary, not the committee, is the final word. So, the lobbying target is 193 missions, and any adverse recommendation can be amended, deferred or voted down on the floor.
Prepare for the bad branch anyway. If the committee recommends against, the answer is a floor fight and a deferral motion, not a press release.
If the seat were left silent, the mandate does not vanish: our representatives keep standing in Geneva bodies, the ILO and treaty processes; host states can continue receiving our offices; the ICJ and ICC tracks are unaffected; friendly missions can carry our text as their own.
What must never happen is allowing a procedural vacancy to be reported as a transfer of legitimacy.
Accountability is not a strategy
Here is where I part company with much of our own advocacy. Documentation is the foundation the referral rests on — without the IIMM’s files there would be nothing to refer, and no case at The Hague. But it has become the reflex answer to everything, and five years of it has produced no ceasefire, no prisoner release and no restraint.
The problem is allocation, not value. Meanwhile a professionalized advocacy layer — donor-dependent, fluent in grant cycles — filters what reaches capitals and crowds out the diaspora networks and the engineers, forensic accountants and trade specialists who could actually map the junta’s supply lines.
Community money goes to rallies and forums run on urgency rather than feasibility, while action on banking channels, shipping insurers and aviation-fuel syndicates go under-resourced.
Two corrections follow. Keep the channels separate: sovereign diplomacy belongs to the National Unity Government (NUG) and Ethnic Resistance Organizations (ERO) leadership, arguing interest to Thailand, India and China; diaspora chapters should stop imitating foreign ministries and use their real leverage — district lawmakers, appropriations, export enforcement, litigation in host countries.
And apply a test before spending anything: who is the counterpart with decision power, what leverage do we hold over them, and what is the probability of a measurable policy shift.
Take our own human rights record seriously
The other half is uncomfortable. Legal pressure on the military only holds if our side is unambiguously the side of civilian protection.
The foundations exist. The NUG lodged an Article 12(3) declaration with the ICC Registrar on July 17, 2021, accepting jurisdiction over crimes committed in Myanmar; the Court confirmed receipt in February 2022 and has still not acted on it.
The June 2021 policy position on the Rohingya committed to citizenship, repatriation and repeal of the 1982 law. Its human rights ministry runs codes-of-conduct training with defense units, and several EROs run their own judicial and humanitarian codes.
What is missing is enforcement people can see. Publish investigation outcomes and disciplinary results, including against our own units. Give monitors and humanitarian agencies access to territory we administer.
Preserve evidence to standards a court will accept. Say publicly that the IIMM’s 2026 finding — that it is investigating crimes by all perpetrators, including members of the Arakan Army— is welcome rather than hostile.
Most of Rakhine is now administered by the Arakan Army, so every promise about Rohingya citizenship and voluntary return runs through that administration in practice, not through Naypyidaw.
Denial costs us the argument; investigation wins it.
And press the honest limit: no amount of documentation will fix the Rohingya’s statelessness or stop the airstrikes while the army sits inside politics.
Citizenship, safe return and civilian control of the military are constitutional questions. Accountability is a floor. Systemic change — a federal settlement with the military out of politics — is the ceiling, and it is the thing our diplomacy should be selling.
One practical gap follows from all this. The Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF) formed on March 30 is the closest thing we have to a unified interlocutor, with a rotating chair and delegated authority.
It did not appear in this month’s Geneva proceedings or in the visible discussion of the referral and the seat — an understandable scheduling failure for an institution five months old, negotiating with the Arakan Army and standing up five committees at the same time.
It is still a gap worth closing quickly, because these rooms set the terms our diplomacy will inherit.
The Human Rights Council’s foreign affairs committee should file a written submission of its own on human rights, atrocity prevention and the referral, this session rather than next, and name the person who carries it.
What to ask policymakers
- Back the referral: support U.N. Security Council action, make every government’s position public, and press the ICC to act both on the pending application against Min Aung Hlaing and on the NUG’s 12(3) declaration.
- Cut the supply lines — jet fuel, arms, dual-use goods and the banking channels behind them need no court’s permission.
- Treat the seat as procedure: uphold Myanmar’s existing legitimate representation, reject the military’s credentials, reject a vacant seat, and lobby the General Assembly, not only the committee.
- Fund what pressure requires — financial tracing, evidence preservation, monitor access — and bring younger administrators, women and ethnic nationality representatives into the rooms.
Geneva has raised the price of legitimizing this regime. Prices only hold if someone keeps charging them.
James Shwe is a Myanmar-American engineer and pro-democracy advocate who works with diaspora coalitions supporting federal democracy in Myanmar.
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