Myanmar’s military and police deliberately killed civilians opposed to its rule in the six months following the coup in February 2021, in a policy that amounts to crimes against humanity, according to new research published on Thursday. “Nowhere Is Safe,” jointly authored by rights group Fortify Rights and the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, documents acts of murder, torture, imprisonment, enforced disappearances, forced population transfer, and persecution that took place between February and July 2021. It found “reasonable grounds to believe that the Myanmar junta is responsible for crimes against humanity.”
It also named 61 senior officials who should be investigated and potentially prosecuted for the alleged abuses, including coup leader and armed forces chief Min Aung Hlaing, and his deputy Soe Win. “Justice is sorely needed in Myanmar, and we believe this report can provide the basis for future investigations,” the Schell Center’s Roger Polack, one of the report’s authors, said at its launch on Thursday, noting that the researchers had compared post-coup events in Myanmar with other atrocities around the world in its legal analysis of the military’s post-coup crackdown.
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