This report argues that concerned countries should press Myanmar to protect the rights to expression and assembly, and reform laws penalizing peaceful speech, to bring them back into line with international standards.

Human Rights Council resolution 34/22 established the independent international fact-finding mission on Myanmar (the Mission). The President of the Council appointed Marzuki Darusman (Indonesia) as chairperson and Radhika Coomaraswamy (Sri Lanka) and Christopher Sidoti (Australia) as members. A secretariat was recruited by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

This report looks at Indonesia’s efforts to respond to the late 2017 violence against the Rohingya that led to one of the largest, fastest refugee flows on record, with more than 700,000 people flooding into Bangladesh in a matter of weeks.

This report provides new details about the Myanmar military’s command structure and troop deployments, as well as the security forces’ arrests, enforced disappearances and torture of Rohingya men and boys in the weeks directly before the current crisis unfolded.

As well as representing a human rights and humanitarian crisis in its own right, the ongoing Rohingya migrant crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh demonstrates the linkages between unresolved internal conflicts, mass displacement and wider instability in Australia’s region.