UN: Suu Kyi’s liability in Rohingya crisis an ‘open-ended question’
GENEVA: United Nations investigators called on Tuesday for an expert evaluation of whether Myanmar's civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi can be legally implicated for the abuses committed against the country's Rohingya minority.
The fact-finding mission to Myanmar, set up by the UN Human Rights Council, said it was not equipped to determine what level of responsibility Ms Suu Kyi should shoulder.
"It will become a legal issue whether or not there is an element of culpability here," fact-finding mission chair Marzuki Darusman told reporters in Geneva.
The council recently created a panel to prepare criminal indictments over the atrocities committed - the Independent International Mechanism for Myanmar - which could have the expertise to determine what responsibility Ms Suu Kyi bears in the crisis.
"It is still an open-ended question to what extent she might be implicated," Mr Darusman said.
The fact-finding mission last year branded the army operation in August 2017 as "genocide" and called for the prosecution of top generals.
Some 740,000 Rohingya fled burning villages, carrying accounts of murder, rape and torture over the border to refugee camps in Bangladesh.
And in a damning report published on Monday, the investigators warned that the 600,000 Rohingya still inside Myanmar's Rakhine state remain in "deplorable" conditions and continue to face a "serious risk of genocide".
Mr Darusman said while it was likely Ms Suu Kyi was not aware in 2017 of the army's activities, "the issue now is that subsequently, there was no further addressing of this issue on her part". - AFP
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