The 215-page lawsuit accuses the military of “systematically killing, raping, torturing, imprisoning, making people disappear”.
A group of Burmese have filed a criminal complaint in Germany accusing their country’s military junta of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The complaint was filed by the human rights group Fortify Rights and those affected with the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office in accordance with the principle of universal jurisdiction.
This allows for the prosecution of serious international crimes regardless of where they were committed, as Fortify Rights said on Tuesday. Those affected are 16 people who live in Burma and other countries and belong to different ethnic groups. Among them are representatives of the Muslim minority of the Rohingya and the ethnic Burmese of the Chin.
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“Killing, Raping, Torturing Systematically”
A spokeswoman for the attorney general in Karlsruhe confirmed receipt of the criminal complaint at the request of the AFP news agency. The 215-page lawsuit alleges that the military “systematically kills, rapes, tortures, detains, enforces disappearances, stalks and commits other acts that constitute genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes”. Germany’s attorney general has repeatedly prosecuted crimes committed abroad, including atrocities committed during the war in Syria.
The announcement is based on more than 1,000 interviews conducted by Fortify Rights since 2013, as well as leaked documents from Burma’s army and defectors, the rights group said. According to the organization, high-ranking military personnel knew about the crimes of their subordinates, but did nothing to prevent them. It also looks at the army’s crackdown on the Rohingya in 2017, which forced more than 740,000 people to flee their homes.
In February 2021, the military staged a coup against the elected government of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Since then, junta troops and anti-coup rebels have been fighting each other across large parts of the country.
Violence has escalated again in recent days. The AFP news agency learned on Tuesday from military circles that there had been drone strikes against servicemen in the town of Kyonedoe in southeastern Karen state. The military then fired artillery at rebel sites “to warn them,” he said.
(APA/AFP)