In the past several months the international community has watched as a huge human tragedy unfolded for the Rohingya people living in the northern Burmese state of Rakhine.
In a culmination of many decades of discrimination, marginalisation and abuse, a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing" has been perpetrated by Burma's security forces against the Rohingya under the guise of an appropriate response to militia violence in the summer.
As a result of the most recent violence, over 655,500 Rohingya people have been forced to flee into Bangladesh in a matter of months.
The Bangladesh Deputy High Commissioner, Khondker M Talha, described the latest episode to us as:
"In the history of mankind, the fastest displacement of a persecuted population"
Given the number of cases reported, we were disappointed that the UK seemed reluctant to commit its full specialist team on sexual violence to assist in this regard.
There seems little point urging the Burmese authorities to self-regulate as they have already cleared their military personnel of any wrongdoing (something the UK Government described as "simply not credible").
We believe that an early, concerted and professional effort to gather the evidence of violent crimes against civilians — whether badged as atrocity crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide — is vital for three reasons:
1. To provide victims with a path towards justice in their individual case.
2. To establish an assumption of accountability, at some point, as a credible possibility to create an effective deterrent to repetition and imitation in other theatres of conflict
3. To establish the foundations for a meaningful process of resolution in the future between communities which is likely to require a robust basis for reconciling both victims and perpetrators to the trauma of the events of the past several months (if not years)
We seriously doubt the efficacy of urging the Burmese authorities to investigate the conduct of its own forces personnel in a "thorough and transparent manner"
The Burmese internal inquiry has already cleared its forces of any wrongdoing in a way which the UK Government describes as "simply not credible". We urge the UK Government to seek other paths to a resolution of this issue.
As elsewhere in the world, in the longer term a lasting resolution will require justice to be seen, and felt, to have been done. Should it ever come to pass, it would be far better for such a process to have a basis in evidence gathered by forensic professionals contemporaneously.
There needs to be an official body to assess and collate all of the evidence of crimes against humanity which NGOs and other visitors to the region can submit.
We recommend that Minister Burt, as the UK's international commissioner on the International Commission on Missing Persons, should involve the Commission in collecting evidence in Northern Rakhine for future criminal convictions.
We believe DFID should consider developing specific plans to tackle the risks of people trafficking into modern slavery in relation to the Rohingya.
We hope a portion of the £40 million package recently announced by the UK Government to counter global modern slavery can be allocated to help prevent trafficking of the Rohingya.
We delivered these recommendations to the Government's Department for International Development on Monday 15 January 2018. They have two months to respond.
Read our full report on Bangladesh and Burma: the Rohingya crisis and find out more about our inquiry into the Rohingya crisis on our website.
