Myanmar, Russia sign pact of ‘mutual protection’ from international prosecution

The junta-controlled newspaper Global New Light of Myanmar (GNLM) reported on Monday that the military regime had entered into an agreement with Russia for “mutual protection” against what it called the “misuse of international legal processes.” During an international legal forum held in Saint Petersburg, Russia between May 19 and 21, a delegation led by the Myanmar junta’s attorney general and minister of legal affairs Dr. Thida Oo took part in a signing ceremony for the protection pact, as well as a supplementary agreement on the steps for implementing it. Legal experts from Russia and Myanmar—countries whose top officials have been accused of war crimes by prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC)—also discussed a legal cooperation programme to be implemented along with the pact. The west African nation of the Gambia filed charges of genocide against the Myanmar military in the United Nations’ (UN) International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague for its involvement in the brutal persecution that forced more than 700,000 Rohingya civilians to flee to Bangladesh in 2017. Seven years after this expulsion, a population of more than a million stateless Rohingya people are still living in sprawling, desperately poor refugee camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar and surrounding areas adjacent to Myanmar. The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2023 for the alleged forcible abduction of children during Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. The following year, prosecutors at the court requested an arrest warrant for Myanmar junta chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing for atrocities committed against the Rohingya religious minority in the country’s northern Rakhine State. With both countries’ officials accused of gross violations of international law, the regimes are cooperating to protect one another, said Aung Myo Min, human rights minister for the publicly mandated, anti-junta National Unity Government (NUG), “They are trying to figure out how to protect each other from consequences for their war crimes. It is nothing more than an attempt to stay as long as they want in power,” he said. “Russia will not be able to fully protect them,” he added, referring to the Myanmar military. Human rights expert Chris Sidoti, a founding member of the advocacy organisation Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M) noted that both the junta and the Russian government have publicly dismissed the international courts’ authority. “But such declarations won’t shield Min Aung Hlaing from international justice and neither will a bilateral agreement with Russia,” Sidoti told Myanmar Now. He interpreted the agreement as a sign of the military’s unease. “It’s clear that Min Aung Hlaing and his junta lackeys can feel the walls of international accountability closing in around them,” he said. Since the Myanmar military deposed the civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, it has been fighting a brutal war against long-established ethnic armed groups as well as a new armed resistance movement. The fighting has devastated the country, putting more than 19 million of Myanmar’s people in need of aid in what the UN has described as a “a significant humanitarian challenge,” made worse by the junta’s frequent use of indiscriminate airstrikes to intimidate civilians in addition to targeting its opponents. Screenshot from Global New Light of Myanmar’s Monday report

Myanmar, Russia sign pact of ‘mutual protection’ from international prosecution

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