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UN Special Rapporteur Will Be Denied Access to Myanmar, Country's Gov't Informed

Sputnik News

11:29 20.12.2017(updated 12:05 20.12.2017)

The UN Myanmar human rights investigator was set to visit the country in January to review the human rights situation in the country, including abuses against the Rohingya Muslim minority.

According to UN human rights investigator Yanghee Lee, she was denied to access Myanmar, as the country's government notified her, ceasing cooperation with the UN envoy for the whole period of her tenure, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has reported.

"This declaration of non-cooperation with my mandate can only be viewed as a strong indication that there must be something terribly awful happening in Rakhine, as well as in the rest of the country," Lee said in a statement.

As the UN envoy has explained, the ban took place weeks before her visit to the country, set for January, aiming to assess human rights across the area, including abuses against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine State.

The UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein in his interview to Sputnik on December 19 accused the Aung San Suu Kyi, the State Counsellor of Myanmar and the de-facto leader of the state of one of the worst humanitarian crisis of the recent times, saying that it might be qualified as genocide in the future.

The Rohignya minority remains the most persecuted group in the Buddhist country, which has forced a lot of them to flee to neighboring Bangladesh and other countries, causing probably the world's fastest growing refugee crisis.

The US has reacted to the issue, calling acts against this minority an "ethnic cleansing," and introducing a bill on sanctions and travel restrictions on Myanmar military officials, while a number of human-rights NGOs, such as Amnesty International, have accused Myanmar of "apartheid".

The conflict betweet Rohignya and Myanmar's government recently escalated after Muslim insurgents attacked security posts in the state on August 25, 2017.

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