Myanmar should pay Reparations to Rohingyas

Prosecute the officers and you still have not rebuilt a house, restored a livelihood or returned a legal status. That gap is what this piece is about.

By May 2018 more than 700,000 people had fled to Bangladesh and the international conversation had settled on investigation and prosecution. Retributive justice is owed, and the article says so. It is simply not the whole of what is owed, and individual criminal liability is a poor instrument for the part that remains.

The ground is state responsibility. An internationally wrongful act attributable to a state generates an obligation to make full reparation, through restitution, compensation and satisfaction. On that footing Myanmar owes the Rohingya reparations as a matter of legal obligation rather than of generosity, and the obligation runs whether or not any individual is ever convicted.

The direction later taken before the International Court of Justice, where the question is a state’s responsibility rather than a person’s guilt, is the one this piece was pointing towards.