Responsibility to Protect? The International Community’s Failure to Protect the Rohingya

The United Nations embraced the doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) in 2005, which states that it is a shared responsibility of the international community to protect peoples from the atrocities of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Regarding Myanmar, the UN Human Rights Council claimed there were gross violations of human rights and international law in Myanmar's Rakhine state. Also, the UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission found evidence of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, and accordingly requested that the international community employ R2P to protect the Rohingya people. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights acknowledged the clearance operation that occurred on 25 August 2017 at the hands of the Myanmar military regime was a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. In spite of this, the international community has taken no effective measures to protect the Rohingya community from what was an “entirely predictable” act of genocide. This paper is a qualitative investigation, a review of possible strategic reasons for why the international community has failed to protect the Rohingya. The paper relies on secondary scholarly literature, policy records, UN, government, and NGO reports, grey literature sources, and online materials. ASEAN's non-interference strategy, the OIC's dependency on diplomacy, the EU's priority for the hybrid democratic transition of Myanmar, the UN's political dialogue strategy, and the UN Security Council's structural weaknesses are obstacles to the international community preventing genocide in Myanmar. This study contributes to understanding the strategies of ASEAN, OIC, EU, UN, ICC, and the ICJ in relation to the Rohingya issue. It examines the chances of these organisations championing R2P, and also considers whether the Rohingya crisis is too intractable or difficult to resolve under current arrangements.