Yes, there is access to the camps. There are restrictions, but they can be navigated by the humanitarian groups and by the United Nations. The United Nations has its humanitarian side, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA. OCHA plays a big role in this.
On the fact-gathering side, though, there is a very key issue that we haven't talked about yet that you ought to know about, which is the issue of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and his office. His office is in Geneva but he has staff in the country.
Typically in a country that is recovering from authoritarianism, war, or whatever, a new government will have a memorandum of understanding with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to set up an office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the country to help the country address its human rights problems or it can be done through a Security Council resolution if it's a country like Afghanistan. But the point is, it's often the case that you have the High Commissioner for Human Rights setting up an office.
When President Obama visited, he compelled, diplomatically, the government to basically promise that they would do that. Yet here we are four years later, and it never happened. There is no formal MOU with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and, as a result, there is no formal office, which means that the few staff that are allowed in are allowed in sort of under the umbrella of the UN at large, and they're under the central authority of the UN residential coordinator, which is a UNDP position.
This means that monitoring the human rights situation in places like Rakhine State—Arakan State—or the war zones of the northeast suffers because there simply aren't as many staff. They're not under a unified office structure. They don't have an MOU with the government that would allow them to negotiate specific terms of access, and there's much more mercy to the government, to the whims of the whole UN system, and everything else.
This has been a key thing we've pressed and pressed again. I'm testifying from Washington. This is one of the sort of thorny little factual things that we brought up even at the White House. We've gone to the White House and said, “They promised President Obama that they would sign an MOU”. It was in a written pledge to President Obama himself, and yet they haven't done it.
Amazingly, even now under the NLD government, it doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon because of de facto military vetoes through the Home Ministry, which has to sign off on it. It's all very bureaucratic and political. It just hasn't happened, and it needs to be hammered through. It's a key thing, because you mentioned monitoring in the camps.
Overall yes, you can get in. We've gotten in. You can get in, but it's a tortured sort of process of navigating with local Rakhine officials to get access. There's also another problem, which is that the Rakhine people in the country are also in very dire straits humanitarian-wise. So a lot of the human rights groups and humanitarian groups have to engage in a kind of a political calculus if they want to access the Rohingya camps. They also have to access some of the poorest parts of the country where Buddhists live and report on their situation as well in order to get a balanced assessment of what the human rights situation is.