Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'll amend what I said. I didn't mean to suggest that Rohingya are all just in Thailand and Malaysia. There are Rohingya all over the world. However, Bangladesh is another key country. There are many, many who have fled there. The problems I talked about in Malaysia exist in Bang

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you for having me.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes, absolutely. The violence was systemic and widespread, and it met the definition. We would not change that. A more interesting question now that I would add to the mix, though, is whether you can have ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity committed via the slow, sort o

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  That's sort of what's going on right now. A little bit is happening: the aid is still going in as the aid groups are helping, and the UN is helping the local Rakhine government. Everything is in a state of suspended ghettoization. There are these ghettos that just kind of stumble

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I think the NLD members of the government are, yes. Sometimes you will find members of the military party who are really interested in learning more about parliamentary procedure and how laws work, but at the end of the day, they have to fall in line and do what the military says

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Being an effective donor in coordination with other donors to promote groups that are working on the issues, as you said, is, of course, a must. Coordinating with other governments on sanctions to keep the sanction regimes that still exist in place, is a must. Our biggest beef, o

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  No.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Remember that back then, the NLD had only a handful of seats it had won in the by-elections and there was actually.... Well, I won't get into it. It's all very internal local politics, but suffice to say, NLD was a minority already and the Muslims were an even smaller minority of

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  You have identified the core issue. It is the elephant in the room. The 2008 constitution, which was passed by a so-called referendum, which was neither free nor fair and which you cannot really call it a referendum, as it was more of a theatrical event, is a deeply flawed docum

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The atmospherics in Arakan State have improved, in the sense that tempers have cooled. Tempers have cooled, essentially, and local Rakhine officials who hate the Rohingya have realized that they actually have other priorities besides hating Rohingya. Because of that, they just

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Well, “denied the right to run” might be one way of putting it. It's a bit complicated, so I don't want to give a hard number. Yes, there were several dozen Muslim candidates who wanted to run on the NLD ticket and ended up not being able to do that. Some of that was because of g

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes, so I don't want to get into the back-and-forth. Suffice it to say that many Muslim candidates, not just Rohingya, but Muslims and others, wanted to run for parliament and weren't allowed to, let alone get elected. That's a problem, and it's one that should be raised not jus

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  There are a couple of things that governments can do. I want to applaud the Government of Canada for working over the years with other interested governments, including the United States government and EU partners, and even Japan, in pushing the human rights issues and concerns a

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The NLD government?