Symposium on Prosecuting Asia-Pacific Crimes: Universal Jurisdiction and the Pursuit of Accountability in the Asia-Pacific

[Antonia Mulvey is a British lawyer, and the founder and executive director of Legal Action Worldwide.]

International law, international justice institutions, and human rights are under extraordinary pressure as conflicts are increasing and displacement is at record levels. Using the law to protect rights and demand justice has rarely been more important, or more difficult.

The Rohingya accountability effort shows both the possibilities and the limits of that work. It shows what can happen when survivors are supported to speak in courts, when evidence collected by international mechanisms is used by states and domestic judges, and when civil society refuses to let atrocity crimes disappear into political convenience. It also shows that justice is rarely one thing. For survivors, it may mean prosecution. It may also mean citizenship, reparations, return, recognition, and the restoration of a future.

In September 2017, I was on the Myanmar–Bangladesh border as the Myanmar military carried out its so-called “clearance operations” against the Rohingya in Rakhine State. Hundreds of thousands of people crossed into Bangladesh within weeks. Half were children. People were desperate, hungry, traumatised, and injured. Children arrived without clothes. Gunshot and machete wounds were visible. Smoke from burning villages could still be seen across the border. Civilians had fled into almost nothing: no shelters, no medical facilities, no food distribution centres, and no sense that anyone would protect them.

I sat day after day listening to Rohingya women and children describe what the Myanmar military had done to them, their families, their communities, and their villages. Mothers described being forced to choose which child might live and which would die. Women described rape, killing, burning, and flight. One woman, whom I will call Shahida, looked directly at me at the end of our conversation and asked quietly:

“Will anyone ever know what has happened to us?”

At the time, I was an investigator with the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (FFM), investigating sexual and gender-based violence and crimes against children. The FFM recorded what survivors told us. It found reasonable grounds to conclude that genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes should be investigated and prosecuted. It named those most responsible, identified units, and set out the chain of command. Then, like many fact-finding missions, it handed the file to the world and waited to see whether any jurisdiction would act.

In November 2019, The Gambia initiated proceedings against Myanmar before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under the Genocide Convention. It was an act of moral and legal clarity by a small West African state far from Rakhine State. Its application relied heavily on the FFM’s findings and the accounts of Rohingya survivors.

In December 2019, I travelled to the ICJ in The Hague with a Rohingya victims’ delegation from the camps in Cox’s Bazar to hear The Gambia’s request for provisional measures. The delegation included women who had suffered from sexual violence and whose husbands and children had been killed by the Myanmar military.  They had never been on a plane, in a car, in a bed, or used a key. They then found themselves in the Peace Palace, close enough to touch Aung San Suu Kyi  who was representing Myanmar.

The Court ordered provisional measures against Myanmar. We cheered, but it was only the start. Myanmar repeatedly breached those measures. There is rarely a panacea in international justice.

Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) worked with The Gambia from 2019 for more than six years, collecting hundreds of pages of survivor testimony, particularly from women, which were submitted to the Court. On 12 January 2026, we returned to the ICJ for the merits hearings: the first genocide case heard by the Court in more than a decade. Eleven states intervened in support of The Gambia’s legal position. None intervened in support of Myanmar.

This time, I represented the Rohingya victims’ delegation from Cox’s Bazar and three survivors who gave evidence in person, something LAW had pressed for. For three weeks, the victims delegation listened as Myanmar denied what had happened to them and their families. The proceedings were painful and harrowing.

Then the three survivor witnesses gave evidence in closed session over three days (their redacted testimonies later made public). NJ had been gang raped; her child was killed and her husband taken by the military. MN was the sole survivor of a massacre in which 87 people were killed. MS spoke of the last time he saw his wife and five children, and of more than 50 family members killed. Each witness walked into the Court with extraordinary courage and dignity. The Court was silent. The judges watched and listened closely. Despite the darkness of what they described, each witness spoke afterwards of feeling lighter for having given evidence.

We do not know what the judgment will be but we are cautiously optimistic. But what happened at the Court matters regardless of the outcome. Rohingya survivors were heard, in their own voices, at the highest forum of the Genocide Convention. Their accounts are now part of the legal record.

The ICJ concerns state responsibility. Individual criminal responsibility requires other routes. One of the most important is universal jurisdiction.

In November 2019, the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK), represented by Tomás Ojea Quintana, filed a complaint in Buenos Aires. It was rejected at first instance, reinstated on appeal, and by November 2021 a criminal investigation was open. In June 2023, seven Rohingya survivors testified in person before the Argentine court: the first time Rohingya survivors had physically appeared in a court of law to give eyewitness testimony about alleged genocide and crimes against humanity committed against them.

LAW represents six of those witnesses: one man and five Rohingya women, all of whom had been subjected to sexual violence or had witnessed it. Their testimony, together with important evidence submitted by the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) in June 2024, helped move the case forward. The Argentine federal prosecutor requested 25 arrest warrants for military and civilian officials for genocide and crimes against humanity. On 13 February 2025, Judge María Servini signed them.

Names that were once treated as untouchable are now attached to arrest warrants issued by an Argentine court. For the women who testified, this mattered profoundly. When one of them returned from giving evidence, she told me:

“Who would have thought it would be us – the Rohingya women – who will hold the Myanmar military to account?”

Argentina matters because it asserted universal jurisdiction without any ordinary jurisdictional nexus to the forum state: no territorial connection, no active nationality link to the alleged perpetrators, and no passive nationality link to the victims. The crimes were committed in Myanmar, against Rohingya victims, by Myanmar officials. Yet an Argentine court acted because its law permits the gravest international crimes to be pursued in this way, and because Argentina’s own history has shaped a legal culture deeply alert to military impunity.

This is the first universal jurisdiction case anywhere in the world to issue arrest warrants for the Rohingya genocide. That is significant. But it must not be oversold.

The Myanmar commanders are not in custody. Argentina cannot compel their surrender from Naypyidaw. Interpol notices and cooperation requests will be ignored by states that protect the Myanmar military or see strategic and commercial value in maintaining relations with it. A warrant is not an arrest, and an arrest warrant should not be confused with a trial.

There is also the problem of immunity. A serving head of state, head of government or foreign minister enjoys personal immunity before foreign domestic courts while in office. That immunity is procedural rather than permanent, but it can block domestic proceedings against those at the top while they remain in office. Min Aung Hlaing, now presented by Myanmar’s military-controlled institutions as president, sits directly within that problem. The legitimacy of that office is heavily contested. But a foreign domestic court or police authority is still likely to proceed cautiously where a suspect is presented as an incumbent head of state.

That is why familiar comparisons require care. Pinochet and Habré are often invoked as proof that former rulers can be reached. But both were former heads of state. Neither example shows that an ordinary domestic court can easily reach a sitting leader protected by personal immunity. The more modest lesson is still important: office may protect for a time, but it does not last forever. A warrant that cannot be enforced today may matter when office is lost, travel changes, or political protection falls away.

This is why LAW has developed suspect-tracking work across the Myanmar, Ukraine and Sudan files. Arrest warrants require operational follow-up. It matters where suspects travel, which states they enter, whether prosecutors are prepared to move quickly, and whether civil society can provide credible information at the right moment. LAW has tracked 50 persons of interest to date and is expanding that work with national prosecutors.

The regional dimension is also changing. For years, the assumption in Southeast Asia was that non-interference would prevent these questions from being asked. ASEAN’s institutional culture, and the wider regional aversion to accountability processes perceived as external, made domestic proceedings against officials from neighbouring states seem unlikely. That assumption is now being tested. Complaints have been filed or initiated in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste.

LAW’s work is built around direct representation of victims and survivors. We represent hundreds of survivors, not only from Myanmar, but also from Sri Lanka, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Ukraine and beyond. We work with 59 partners, and 80 per cent of our teams are on the frontlines.

The first question we ask survivors is what kind of justice they want. The answer is not always criminal prosecution. In 2023, LAW surveyed just over 500 Rohingya survivors, five years after the clearance operations. A majority said they wanted citizenship and reparations before criminal prosecution. That does not make prosecutions unimportant. It shows that justice must be understood on survivors’ terms. After years in camps, the demand for legal status, repair, safety and a future is not separate from justice. It is central to it.

In the last two years, LAW has secured 315 favourable decisions in national, regional and international courts, including arrest warrants, injunctions, convictions and compensation. We have also worked on cases involving attacks against aid workers, including killings, torture, sexual violence and detention. In the last year, we secured the release of 20 aid workers globally and assisted more than 147.

When Shahida asked whether anyone would ever know what had happened to the Rohingya, I could not answer her. Today, the answer is different. The world’s highest court has heard Rohingya survivors speak in their own voices. An Argentine judge has signed arrest warrants for those alleged to have ordered the crimes committed against them. The ICC Prosecutor has requested an arrest warrant against Min Aung Hlaing. A Rohingya activist has walked into the Attorney-General’s office in Jakarta with a complaint in her hand.

None of this is enough. Survivors still live without citizenship, reparations, return, or safety. Many perpetrators remain protected. But the record is no longer empty. The law has moved because survivors, many of them women, insisted on being heard, and because lawyers, investigators, states, and civil society actors were prepared to act with them.

If victims and survivors have the courage to speak, the rest of us must have the courage to act. The Asia-Pacific region is now at the centre of some of the most important accountability efforts in the world. Victims and survivors, particularly women, must continue to lead the way.