International ‘Victim-centred’ Justice and the Crisis of Legitimacy: Who Speaks on Behalf of Rohingya Women?

Abstract

This article describes the outsized influence of international human rights actors in determining how justice should be pursued for Rohingya women and explains how efforts to consult with this community have been largely limited to informing them about already-existing mechanisms, operating in accordance with pre-defined conceptualizations of justice. We argue both that current international justice processes focused on crimes committed against the Rohingya are unable to respond to the needs of female victims and that international justice mechanisms in general have been much better at engaging with and responding to international civil society than they have been with victim communities.

Keywords

Transitional justice Gender justice Rohingya

I. Introduction

In 2017, the Myanmar government carried out what they described as ‘clearance operations’ against the ethnic Rohingya population in Rakhine state, displacing over 700,000 Rohingya into neighbouring Bangladesh. As of January 2026, the crowded refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, along the Bangladeshi coastline, hosts over one million Rohingya refugees—an estimated 75% of whom are women and children (UNHCR, 2026). During the clearance operations, women¹ were targeted with gendered crimes, including sexual violence (UNHRC, 2018). Once the population was displaced to the refugee camp, a concerted campaign to bring them justice began. Many international organizations and media outlets specifically focused on the right to justice for sexual violence survivors, with some women saying they had been interviewed up to 70 times by journalists, researchers and investigators (Olston, 2019). As this article will describe, the actors envisaging what justice for Rohingya women would entail and look like—and who eventually set up the multiple court cases and mechanisms looking into crimes committed against them—were predominantly UN actors, international lawyers and international civil society organizations (CSOs), occasionally with the input of Rohingya Diaspora groups. This article questions whether the justice processes established by these actors have the ability to listen and pursue a form of justice that is meaningful to the Rohingya women who were victimized and displaced by the conflict. In doing so, it scrutinizes the extent to which those advocating for justice for Rohingya women are considered legitimate by those for whom the justice is sought.

Two of the authors of this article, Minara and Showkutara, are the directors of camp-based, community-led women’s groups: Education and Wisdom Development for Rohingya Women (EWDRW) and Rohingya Women Association for Empowerment and Development (RWAED), respectively. Minara and Showkutara led discussions on justice and accountability with a broad range of women living within the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar over a 15-month period and helped the participants in these sessions to articulate their own descriptions of what justice means to them. The third author, Clare Brown, is a lawyer formerly with Victim Advocates International (VAI), who represents Minara and Showkutara in several legal processes, including before the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The second section of this article, following this introduction, sets out our methodology. The third section discusses the emerging norm of victim-centredness in transitional justice processes under international policy and practice. The fourth section provides an overview of the current international and transnational justice forums set up to respond to the crimes committed against the Rohingya and examines the extent to which these have been ‘victim-centred’. The fifth section enumerates the challenges faced by these mechanisms in pursuing justice that is meaningful to Rohingya women. The sixth describes EWDRW and RWAED—female-led, community-based organizations that have established themselves in the camp and who regularly discuss issues of justice and accountability with their peers. These and other female-led organizations from the camp are often overlooked, both by male-led Rohingya groups and international justice actors, and yet, as this article will argue, are the most legitimate representatives of the Rohingya women who experienced the conflict. The seventh section of the article analyses the findings made by Minara and Showkutara through their 15-month project, conducting trainings and conversations with women in the camp about what justice means to them. Finally, the eighth section draws conclusions about the mismatch between conceptualizations of justice held by Rohingya women, and those offered by international and transnational mechanisms—and contemplates what this says about how transitional justice processes should be designed and implemented going forward.

II. Methodology

The article is based on findings made by EWDRW and RWAED from September 2022 to December 2023, in which time they conducted workshops with over 1,500 women in the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on the justice processes focused on crimes committed in Myanmar. These workshops combined trainings on the relevant international justice processes with focus group discussions, Q&A sessions and other discussion formats—designed by Showkutara and Minara—to obtain feedback from the women about their reactions to these attempts by the international community to pursue justice on their behalf. The research methods were qualitative and observational, with Minara and Showkutara polling women on what they knew or thought at the beginning of each session; having discussions with them throughout; and ending with a conversation about what they had learned. Templates for gathering informed consent from participants were developed by all authors and explained by Minara and Showkutara to participants in each session. Participants then signed or thumb-printed (for those who are illiterate or unable to sign) next to their name, to indicate their consent. Minara and Showkutara collected and translated all primary data gathered through the sessions. Minara, Showkutara and Brown analysed the data together, and then Brown used this analysis to write the article.

This community-led, open and dialogic research method was explicitly designed to create safe, supportive spaces for victims to voluntarily share the information they view as being the most important – avoiding the extractive, leading approaches that have resulted in certain women having to repeat their experiences of trauma again and again. This approach also allowed us to avoid revolving our research around the experience and parameters of external actors, and to gain more authentic insight into the opinions and responses of the Rohingya women respondents. The responses given by the women were not monolithic, did not fit neatly within the topics discussed at each session and revealed varying conceptualizations of justice that were often far removed from those envisaged by international justice mechanisms. Feminist research methodologies remind us that such multitudes of insights and experiential knowledges help researchers to achieve a fuller picture of affected communities—especially when those contributing to this picture comprise ‘ordinary people’, rather than ‘local elites’ (Julian, 2019).

III. Victim-centred Approaches to Transitional Justice

Recognition has grown over the past three decades of the need to centre victims of crimes committed during conflict in transitional justice processes. This is due to both enhanced efforts to employ a human rights-based approach to justice and accountability efforts and the pragmatic realization that there are ‘real limits on the ability of outsiders to shape, direct, and influence events within states emerging from conflict’ (Donais, 2009). As noted by McEvoy and McConnachie (2013), ‘the language of victim-centrism has permeated all approaches to transitional justice’. The UN Secretary General’s 2010 Guidance Note on the UN Approach to Transitional Justice demands the ‘centrality of victims in the design and implementation of transitional justice processes and mechanisms’. This Guidance Note also references the importance of transitional justice mechanisms incorporating a ‘gender and women’s rights perspective’.

Understanding ‘Gender Justice’ as Accountability for Gendered Violence

Historically, there was a tendency for UN and other expert guidance to construe including a ‘women’s rights perspective’ as meaning that justice mechanisms must focus on accountability for sexual and gender-based violence. The four UN Security Council Resolutions on the Women, Peace and Security agenda, which concern women’s involvement in transitional justice, for example, focus near-exclusively on the importance of accountability for sexual crimes committed in conflict.² In the last decade, however, international guidance has increasingly emphasized the importance of women contributing to the design and implementation of the transitional justice processes themselves. For example, though the 2010 Guidance Note uses the bulk of its section on gender to discuss accountability for sexual violence, it also highlights the necessity of ‘consultations with women to determine their priorities for transitional justice initiatives’ (UN Secretary General, 2010). In 2012, a guidance document published by UN Women explained, ‘Involving women in the design of transitional justice programmes is simply good practice: it is not possible to design effective mechanisms for beneficiaries without their input’ (Valji et al., 2012). In 2013, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women released a General Recommendation on women in conflict prevention, conflict and post-conflict situations, which recommends states to ‘ensure that women are involved in the design, operation and monitoring of transitional justice mechanisms at all levels’, and to ‘ensure their participation in the design of all reparations programmes’.

Exclusion of Most-affected Women

Despite the rhetoric around victim-centred justice, and the acknowledgement of the importance of including women in the design of transitional justice processes, conversations about how justice should be sought, against whom, and what it should look like tend in practice to be led and dominated by specific categories of actors (Braniff et al., 2021). These actors generally consist of governments responsible for establishing national transitional justice mechanisms, multi-lateral actors such as the UN and the African Union and international ‘experts’, lawyers and CSOs (Leonardsson and Rudd, 2015). The CSOs amongst this coalition often claim legitimacy as representatives of the affected community. As Slim (2002) explains, these actors may speak ‘as’, ‘with’ or ‘for’ affected communities: ‘as’ if they are CBOs made up of victims of human rights violations; ‘with’ if they work very closely with such people and speaks with their consent; and ‘for’ if the marginalized group is unable to speak for themselves. This last form of representation, he warns, must be treated with great caution—emphasizing that external CSOs ‘will lose all legitimacy if they are found to be masquerading’ as direct representatives of the community. Instead, these organizations must speak ‘with’ CBOs and affected populations to understand their needs, priorities and perspectives (Slim, 2002).

In the context of post-conflict transition processes, the need to seek out and include ‘local’ perspectives is now widely accepted. In many cases, however, the implementation of this principle has not gone beyond consultations with token categories of community representatives, hosted ‘long after more fundamental questions of design and set-up have already been established’ (Sharp, 2014). Robins finds that in transitional justice contexts around the world, national consultations ‘have had rather minimal impact on the subsequent unfolding of processes very much moulded on the global model’. He questions, ‘As the essential elements of a [transitional justice] process have become increasingly standardised, what room is there for these to be impacted in form and implementation by victims’ agendas?’ (Robins 2017). Julian et al (2019) observe that consultations with conflict-affected communities may succeed in recognizing and engaging local actors—but when it comes to whose knowledge will be used to chart the way forward, ‘the privilege of outsider expertise has remained largely unchallenged, despite the heightened attention to “the local”’. This general state of affairs—relevant to much of the human rights and humanitarian sectors—is reflected in the histories of the justice processes set up for the Rohingya.

IV. The Justice Mechanisms Investigating Crimes Committed Against the Rohingya

In the wake of the atrocities committed against the Rohingya population in 2017, international actors engaged in a well-intentioned scramble to identify possible options for pursuing justice on behalf of this persecuted community. The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) was established to investigate violations committed against the Rohingya and prepare case files for criminal investigations in 2018; the ICC authorized an investigation into the situation in Bangladesh/Myanmar in 2019, and the Prosecutor requested an arrest warrant for the leader of the Myanmar military in 2024; a universal jurisdiction (UJ) case commenced in Argentina in 2021; the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accepted jurisdiction over a case alleging genocide on the part of Myanmar, filed by the Gambia, in 2022; and another request to initiate a UJ case was initiated in Germany in 2023, though this was later declined by the German federal prosecutor (IIMM, 2025).

Justice Mechanisms That Consulted Rohingya Victims Before Their Establishment

As decisions were made about which cases to take and what mechanisms to establish to pursue justice for the Rohingya, consultations were held with those who had been affected by the conflict by some, but not all, of these international mechanisms. The ICC’s Victims Participation and Reparations Section (VPRS) and Outreach office conducted a series of visits to the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp before the Court opened its investigation in 2019. VPRS reports that it held 60 meetings during four visits to the camp, over a four-month period, in which time it met with a total of 1,700 people (ICC VPRS, 2019). In its 60 meetings with the community, VPRS describes informing the participants about ICC and seeking views and concerns relating to the opening of an investigation (ICC VPRS, 2019). Fortify Rights, the organization who initiated the request for the universal justification case in Germany, did so on behalf of 16 individual victims of abuses by the Myanmar military—half of whom, they reported, were Rohingya who had survived the 2017 clearance operations (Fortify Rights, 2023). Fortify Rights has ongoing relationships and frequent contact with many of the Rohingya groups in Cox’s Bazar refugee camp, including RWAED and EWDRW. The information they have released about their attempted initiation of this case suggests that the complainants were active and involved participants in the decision to submit the complaint.

Justice Mechanisms That Did Not Consult Rohingya Victims Before Their Establishment

The Argentine lawyers, the teams at the ICJ and the IIMM, by contrast, did not seek the input of Rohingya who had been affected by the conflict before opening their cases or investigations. In Argentina, the impetus for the Prosecutor deciding to start a case based on principles of universal jurisdiction was a complaint filed by the Burmese Rohingya Organization UK (BROUK)—a London-based CSO, comprised of Diaspora Rohingya who lived outside of Myanmar in 2017 (GRC, 2025). The Argentine court granted BROUK permission to file the case on behalf of the Rohingya who experienced the clearance operations directly. The court has since also granted standing to lawyers representing Rohingya living in the camp and has allowed some to testify in their proceedings (GJC, 2023). The case at the ICJ was initiated at the behest of the Gambian Justice Minister—a former Prosecutor from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, whose visit to Cox’s Bazar convinced him that, as in Rwanda, a genocide had occurred (Ross, 2019). Rohingya victim communities were not consulted before the case was brought. The IIMM, whose mandate is to collect, preserve and analyse evidence of the most serious international crimes committed in Myanmar, and use this to prepare case files to share with tribunals conducting investigations into these crimes, began its work as soon as this mandate was bequeathed to it by the UN Human Rights Council (IIMM, 2025). The IIMM has since taken steps to cultivate its relationship with Rohingya groups, including visiting the camp in Cox’s Bazar, and participating in online information-sharing activities with camp-based Rohingya.³ In 2023, the IIMM held its first Civil Society Dialogue, bringing together ‘representatives from 20 civil society organisations to build stronger relationships and increase mutual trust and understanding’ (IIMM, 2023). This Dialogue was held in Berlin and brought together primarily Rohingya Diaspora groups. It did not include members of the victim community living in Cox’s Bazar.

V. Challenges Faced by These Mechanisms in Pursuing Justice That Is Meaningful to Rohingya Women

Despite the unusually large number of accountability mechanisms focused on the violence committed against the Rohingya, and the efforts of at least some of these mechanisms to engage with victims, we argue that none of these processes are in fact victim-centred, nor are they capable of pursuing a form of justice that would be meaningful to a critical mass of Rohingya women. We make this argument for three reasons.

First—and most critically—the forms that these mechanisms take, and the type of justice they are able to deliver, are pre-decided. There is no ability, within any of the international or transnational justice processes that are underway, to truly take into account the needs and priorities of victim communities when determining what the process will look like. Second, each of these mechanisms has conflated the idea of gendered justice with the idea of prosecuting gender-based crimes. This tendency is an example of a wider trend amongst international development, humanitarian and human rights actors to fixate on the spectre of sexual violence, while ignoring women’s urgent need for food, shelter and security before and after conflict—necessities which almost all women spoken to as part of this project prioritized in their vision of obtaining justice. Third, these mechanisms consistently prioritize engaging with civil society that advocates on behalf of Rohingya victims over the Rohingya victims themselves. These factors are considered in more detail below.

Inability to Take Women’s Perspectives of Justice into Account When Determining How to Proceed

Current international justice mechanisms do not have the ability to mould themselves around the needs and justice priorities of women from the affected communities. After the ICC’s VPRS and Outreach office’s visits to Cox’s Bazar, described above, VPRS released a report concluding that ‘every single Rohingya in the camps want[ed] an investigation by the Court into all potential crimes committed against them’ (ICC VPRS, 2019). It asserted that the number of Rohingya it had received direct or indirect representations from during its visits was 470,000—a stark claim, given the adult population of the refugee camp at the time was 359,100 (UNHCR, 2019). It did not disaggregate victim perceptions or feedback by gender. The report acknowledged that given the challenges in meeting with community members, and the short timeframe over which the consultations were carried out, it could ‘not exclude the possibility that not all victims represented understood the process’ (ICC VPRS, 2019). The community-led sessions undertaken by the authors of this article with women in the camp indicate that many female victims indeed did not understand the process. Most, in fact, could not describe the ICC at all—with participants in pre-training assessments guessing that the ICC was ‘a country’, ‘a hospital name’, ‘a city name at America’ and ‘a football team name, like Argentina’.⁴ Even if VPRS’s consultations with the victims did successfully explain the scope and potential outcome of the ICC proceedings to some camp residents, their reports indicate that they did not use these consultations to gather genuine feedback from the community about how they define justice, or what justice outcomes they consider most important. The statements made by the VPRS support the argument that ‘despite making often extravagant claims for victim engagement’, the approaches to transitional justice implemented by international justice institutions ‘can be seen to be almost exclusively nominal or instrumental in how victims participate’ (Robins 2017).

The IIMM, too, provides information to victim communities but is not currently designed in a way that allows it to learn from these communities about their conceptualization of justice. In Argentina and at the ICJ, those representing the Rohingya, and requesting certain remedies on their behalf, are actors other than the victimized Rohingya themselves— a diaspora group and the Gambian state, respectively. There are no mechanisms in place for these institutions to learn about whether their activities involve a version of justice that is meaningful to the populations they are acting on behalf of.

Conflating ‘Gender Justice’ with ‘Addressing Gendered Violence’

Truly integrating gender into international legal mechanisms requires considering the ways in which gender impacts all aspects of their processes and procedures. The ability to effectively investigate, prosecute or adjudicate cases involving the commission of sexual and gender-based crimes is part of this process—and many of the international justice mechanisms have a focus on this. The Rome Statute establishing the ICC enumerates a wide range of sexual crimes and obligates the Prosecutor to appoint an adviser on sexual and gender-based violence to assist their prosecution. The IIMM team includes a gender and child rights advisor, who has met with EWDRW and RWAED, and explained her experience and focus on the investigation of gendered crimes. In the ICJ case, the announcement by the Netherlands and Canada of their intention to intervene in the proceedings specifies that they will do so with a special focus on sexual and gender-based violence (GJC, 2020). The Argentina UJ case has a particular focus on sexual violence, and six of the Rohingya victims who testified in the proceedings are women who were subjected to rape by the Myanmar military (Kamruzzaman, 2021).

Including a focus on the prosecution of gender-based crimes is not, however, the only prerequisite for mainstreaming gender considerations throughout the operations of a transitional justice forum—and women should not expect to be engaged in justice processes only if they are survivors of rape. The focus on sexual violence in these international mechanisms has been the result of concerted campaigns from international women’s rights lawyers and Global North feminist groups (Abu-Lughod, 2023). In recent years, a growing number of Global South and transnational feminists have argued that while these campaigns have been effective in pushing accountability for sexual violence to the forefront of international security discourses, they have done so at the expense of de-prioritizing the economic, social and cultural rights of conflict-affected women (Abu-Lughod, 2023; Bertotti et al., 2021). Bertotti et al. (2021) highlight the ‘tendency for international women’s rights movements to focus on a particular ideal of the ‘Third World woman’, which excludes the existence of localized or personal everyday harms and rather focuses solely on women’s experience of sexual violence in armed conflict’. In RWAED and EWDRW’s sessions with women in the camp, participants overwhelmingly indicated that the daily violations of their rights to food, clean water and medicine were more debilitating than the crimes they had been subjected to during the conflict. International justice actors are unlikely to consider such violations within their mandate—a reality rooted in the prioritization of civil and political rights over economic, social and cultural rights in international justice theory and practice (Robins 2017).

International transitional justice institutions should seek the input and guidance of camp-based Rohingya women groups in their capacity as representatives of the community seeking justice, not just as survivors of sexual crimes. They should do so in a way that allows space for these women to discuss conceptualizations of justice that fall outside those given priority by international criminal law. Such an engagement would entail obtaining input from these groups directly and to employ methodologies of engagement that allow them to speak freely, without binding them to conceptualizations of justice favoured by external ‘experts’ from the international community (Julian et al., 2019).

Civil Society and Advocacy Groups Who Speak on Behalf of Rohingya, but Do Not Represent Them

There are numerous actors in the international justice space who advocate on behalf of victims. Many of the international justice mechanisms mentioned in this article have been influenced by civil society groups—including, as noted above, Global North feminists who have advocated effectively for these mechanisms to involve a focus on the prosecution of sexual violence (WCGJ, 2023). There are also many actors who advocate on behalf of Rohingya victims specifically. Prior to former ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opening the case in Myanmar/Bangladesh, she was lobbied to do so by international human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Fortify Rights and the Global Center for Responsibility to Protect (Eckert, 2018). Dossiers of evidence supporting an investigation were submitted by the Public International Law and Policy Group, Global Rights Compliance and Legal Action Worldwide (GRC, 2025). The case in Argentina, as described above, was initiated by a Rohingya Diaspora group based in the UK. After the case against Myanmar was filed by the Gambia at the ICJ, campaigns started by Diaspora Rohingya groups and national CSOs eventually convinced Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to formally intervene in the proceedings (Cakmak, 2020; ICJ, 2023).

The involvement of civil society in advocating for victim rights is not a phenomenon confined to the Rohingya space alone. In South Africa, a series of conferences organized by the NGO Justice in Transition were instrumental in the establishment of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Backer, 2003). In Bolivia, civil society led the advocacy efforts to demand that President Meza and his associates be held accountable for their crimes (Braniff et al., 2021). In Ireland and Northern Ireland, victim advocates—individuals dedicated to working with victims to help them pursue their rights to justice—have played an important part in demanding accountability for over 30 years (Braniff et al., 2021). Madlingozi (2010) refers to the phenomenon of ‘transitional justice entrepreneurs’ to describe those involved in the process of either reproducing or speaking on behalf of victims in transitional justice processes. In the Rohingya space and others, those involved in such conversations include a broad spectrum of actors—from those who have ongoing relationships with and enjoy legitimacy within victim communities, to those who speak on victims’ behalf without attempting to understand their priorities or needs. As noted by McEvoy (2017), however, even those actors with legitimacy amongst victim communities sometimes fail to sufficiently problematize the power relations at play in their relationship with these groups.

One way this trend manifests is in the language used to discuss transitional justice processes and objectives (Braniff, 2021). When RWAED and EWDRW began their sessions with women in the Rohingya community, a primary motive was our awareness that the vast majority of the Rohingya in the refugee camp are unfamiliar with notions of transitional justice, international law and human rights. Discussions about justice are often carried out with reference to these terms and concepts, which are alien to most Rohingya victims—thereby centring elite, international and ‘expert’ civil society actors at the expense of those for whom the justice is ostensibly for (Robins, 2017). As noted by Robins,

In a state where only elites know what rights are, they can become something that are largely claimed on behalf of victims rather than by victims themselves. The result is that victims must be represented by human rights experts, substituting empowerment for passivity and dependence upon others.

The prioritization of those conversant in the language of international justice and human rights has been apparent within the ICC and the IIMM’s efforts to engage with civil society, including victim groups. When these outreach efforts have involved international or diaspora CSOs, the ICC and the IIMM have requested input and feedback on their policies and ways of operating. Their engagements with victim communities, by contrast, have tended to be a one-way flow of information. In a 2023 consultative meeting on the crime of gender persecution, for example, the ICC Prosecutor, Karim Khan, sought input from groups about how to best prosecute that crime (Khan, 2023). By contrast, when camp-based Rohingya groups were invited to a meeting with Prosecutor Khan during his second visit to the camp in 2023—a meeting attended by one of the authors of this article—the interaction was purely for the purpose of transmitting information and did not provide an opportunity for the groups to provide input or feedback. Similarly, when describing its interactions with non-camp-based civil society during its inaugural civil society dialogue, the IIMM reported that the input of these groups would ‘help inform the Mechanism’s working methods and support improved collaboration’ (IIMM, 2023). By contrast, in promoting its outreach with the camp-based Rohingya community, the IIMM described purely information-transmitting activities, including the release of explanatory videos and visuals (IIMM, 2023).

The challenges involved in soliciting input and advice from camp-based Rohingya about what justice processes should look like, and how they should be implemented, are formidable. Issues with access to the camp, including limited entry for international actors and unreliable internet connectivity, present one barrier. The greater challenge, however, is navigating the dynamics of a community that has largely been denied the right to formal education, is unfamiliar with international legal frameworks, and is immersed in an environment where misinformation and rumours proliferate. These obstacles are more acute for women: at the time they arrived in the refugee camp, 75% of Rohingya women and 61% of Rohingya men were illiterate (UNICEF, 2018). Overcoming these barriers to facilitate meaningful dialogue about their aspirations for justice demands perseverance, innovative approaches— and working with women from within the community.

VI. Legitimate Representatives of the Community: EWDRW and RWAED

EWDRW and RWAED were established by Minara and Showkutara in 2018 and 2019, respectively. At the time they were established, they were two of a handful of organizations established by women in the Cox’s Bazar camp. Gradually, however, women leaders have received threats or, conversely, opportunities to leave the camp—leaving EWDRW and RWAED as two of the largest and longest established women’s organizations still operating. When these organizations first formed, they did not have a focus on issues of justice and accountability, working instead on basic service provision. In 2021, however, Minara and Showkutara indicated to VAI that they wanted to understand more about the legal cases being taken on behalf of their community. VAI provided Minara and Showkutara with three months of online lessons, and then supported them to create their own training plans, which they used to run sessions with interested women.

In 2022 and 2023, EWDRW and RWAED conducted trainings with over 1,500 women and around 50 men on the justice processes relevant to their community. As part of these trainings, Minara and Showkutara hosted discussions with participants, assessing and exploring their reactions to the information shared. That it was Minara and Showkutara who designed these sessions, hosted them and updated the methodology as they went along is essential to our methodology—which is able to include and centre Rohingya women in a way external ‘experts’ cannot. In the EWDRW and RWAED-led sessions, trainers did not employ the language of transitional justice, international law or human rights. Instead, they used parables—as is common in Rohingya culture—and provided examples recognizable from the daily lives of the women in the camp. The fact that they spoke to the women as their peers, and in their own language, was raised many times by the female participants as an essential component of making the material accessible. As told by one woman to Minara, ‘Even my parents don’t know this [information about the court processes]. My father doesn’t know. We are grateful to learn about this, in our language, through you’.⁵

Despite the legitimacy enjoyed by RWAED and EWDRW in being able to speak to the plethora of opinions and perspectives held by displaced Rohingya women, these and the other camp-based women’s groups that have existed over the years have been less visible in conversations about justice than international women’s groups, Rohingya women from the Diaspora, and male-led groups from the camp. As described in the section above, the actors that advocated for the initiation these justice processes, or the direction they have taken, include the Gambian Foreign Minister (for opening the ICJ case), CSOs in foreign countries (for lobbying those nations to intervene in the ICJ case), a Diaspora Rohingya group (for the universal jurisdiction case in Argentina), and international human rights organizations (for all of the above). A simple internet search for online events held to discuss justice for the Rohingya reveals that these are almost always attended and moderated by a combination of international lawyers or members of international human rights organizations, and Rohingya from the diaspora. If one were to refine the search to look for Rohingya women specifically, they would find that the most high-profile and frequent commentators are Wai Wai Nu, who was imprisoned in Myanmar along with her family from 2005 until 2012, and who currently resides in the USA; and Razia Sultana, a Rohingya rights activist born in Bangladesh. Nu and Sultana are inspiring women and important advocates for the Rohingya community—but the insight they bring is as Rohingya women who do not currently live in the refugee camp, and who were not in Myanmar during the clearance operations of 2017.

Within the camp, community leadership includes both the system of Majhis— traditional leaders who are officially recognized by camp management and the Bangladesh government—and community-based organizations. All Majhis in the Cox’s Baar refugee camp are male (Cheong, 2022). Rohingya community organizations range from small or medium-sized collectives representing specific populations to larger and more powerful groups that provide governance and service provision. Some of these, such as the Arakan Rohingya Student Army and the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation, are also militia groups and govern in part through fear tactics and criminal activities (IISS, 2023). Other governance groups, such as the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, are seen as providing a ‘moderate’ Rohingya leadership and are not armed (Sullivan, 2022). All of the community groups vying for power and authority in the camp are male-led. This reflects opinions held generally amongst the community about the unsuitability of women for leadership roles, by people of all genders. In a survey carried out by the Gender in Humanitarian Action Working Group in 2021, 67.5% of Rohingya women and 62% of Rohingya men living in the camp agreed with the statement, ‘women cannot be a good leader’ (Cheong, 2022).

VII. Findings from the Training and Awareness Raising Sessions by EWDRW and RWAED

The following section analyses the findings made in the training and discussion sessions EWDRW and RWAED held on issues of justice and accountability with women living in the camp.

‘The ICC Is a Hospital’ and ‘Argentina Is a Football Team’: Lack of Knowledge About the International Justice Processes Set Up for the Rohingya

The training run by Minara and Showkutara included sessions on the ICC, ICJ, IMM and the Argentina case. Pre-training assessments from these sessions indicated that less than 10% of women knew what these acronyms stood for or referred to. When asked about the case in Argentina, answers included, ‘Argentina is a country in Europe’, ‘Argentina is a football team who won the world cup’, ‘Argentina is a court set up for the Rohingya’⁶ and ‘I don’t know what Argentina is’.⁷ More detailed questions were asked about what crimes the different mechanisms were investigating, and what each case would achieve if successful. Not a single correct answer was given.

‘The ICC Will Solve Our Problems and We Can Go Back Home’: Expectations of What Could Be Achieved

More concerning than the lack of information the female participants had about the different mechanisms, however, was their understanding of what these cases would be able to achieve. While the majority of women did not recognize the name of these mechanisms on first hearing, those who did—or who recognized the description once an explanation had been given—were then asked what these institutions were working towards. When asking this question in relation to the ICC, the women gave responses such as, ‘The ICC will solve our problems and we can go back home’, ‘If the ICC wins the cases, we can go back to our country’ and ‘The ICC is working to get everything that was taken by the Myanmar government back to us, and so that we can live with freedom in Myanmar’.⁸ In trainings on the ICJ, they gave similar responses: ‘The ICJ will send Rohingya people to Myanmar’; ‘If the case is successful, they will arrest the Myanmar military and let us go back to Myanmar’; ‘If the ICJ wins the case, we can go back to our country with full rights and dignity’.⁹

These answers reflect the conceptualization of justice most commonly held by Rohingya women living in the camp: that justice means going home and being able to return to the lives they enjoyed before the conflict. Notes from the conversations had during these sessions reveal that when visualizing what life after ‘justice’ would look like, the women overwhelmingly described having their houses returned to them, enough food to eat and safety and security for their children. These findings are in line with research conducted with victim communities globally, which has found that, in the aftermath of conflict, the most commonly articulated demands are those for security and basic needs (Robins, 2017). As has been noted by Saeed, among others, ‘if one’s stomach is empty, if one does not have shelter or access to medical care when needed, the right to truth and accountability, among other civil and political rights, may seem a luxury’ (2016). What is notable from the discussions with the Rohingya women, however, is that they did not discuss the fulfilment of these basic needs as an objective to be prioritized over the pursuit of justice—but rather, a fundamental component of justice itself.

‘Punishment Means Revenge. We Don’t Want’: Disconnect Between Local and International Definitions of Justice

An inescapable conclusion from these training sessions has been that in conversations about ‘justice for the Rohingya’, members of the international justice community and Rohingya women have been talking past each other. When international lawyers talk of ‘justice’ being achieved through the ICC proceedings, they refer to the possibility of carrying out successful prosecutions—meaning criminal accountability for a handful of top-level perpetrators, and some form of remedy for a select number of victims. The IIMM is set up to support this, and other criminal investigations, and the Argentina case is also focused on top-level criminal accountability. While it has been argued that ‘bringing accountability for serious crimes in Myanmar will … contribute to an atmosphere that is more conductive to repatriation’ (Koumjian, 2023), the reality is that the mandates of these courts and mechanisms do not extend to supporting the Rohingya to return home. In each of the trainings conducted with the women in the camp, this revelation has surprised people. One Rohingya woman, when responding to information about the type of accountability on offer, stated, ‘We don’t care much about punishment. Just, we are willing to return with full rights, and with no genocide happening in the future. Punishment means revenge. We don’t want’.¹⁰ Another agreed:

We just want peace. We need to find ways so that we can go back to our country with rights, safety, and security. If we take revenge from Myanmar for committing genocide, then they will imprison us and initiate violence. No need to do these kinds of acts.¹¹

These responses, too, are in line with findings from research conducted with other victim communities globally. In a study into the impact of prosecutions on victims of human rights violations predominantly located in Argentina and Chile, for example, O’Connell (2005) found little evidence that criminal trials were a ‘healing’ experience for victims and concluded that increased attention should be paid to non-judicial alternatives to address victims’ psychological needs. Perceptions of crime, punishment, justice and peace within the camp are also gendered. In some contexts, research has suggested that preferences for criminal or punitive justice processes are more likely to be held by men (Kutateladze and Crossman, 2009; Mackey et al., 2006).

‘If They Have Jail for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Why Not for Our Rapists?’: Diverse Perspectives on Justice Amongst Rohingya Women

The above findings do not indicate that all Rohingya women de-prioritize punitive accountability for those alleged to be involved in the violence against them. Some of the participants indicated that, though returning to Myanmar is their most pressing justice priority, they did not feel they could do so while perpetrators of rape and sexual violence continued to live unpunished in their communities. The perpetrators they named, however, were low-level soldiers and ethnic Rakhines who directly committed the alleged crimes—those likely falling below the threshold of importance needed to warrant attention by the ICC or a UJ investigation. In a discussion on the case in Argentina, a woman asked, ‘If they have jail for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, why not for our rapists?’¹²

These answers speak to tensions and diversity within the women’s perspectives on what they want justice to look like. We have observed these differences not only between different members of the group, but in the way in which individual women’s understanding of justice has changed over the years since they fled Myanmar. In the absence of any credible or imminent avenue for redress, there has been little need to reconcile or prioritize among these different visions, meaning that conceptualizations of justice held by the community are dynamic and continuously evolving.

‘We Can Go Back to Our Country with Full Rights and Dignity’: Common Perspectives on Justice Amongst Rohingya Women

Despite these diversities of opinions, two features of the women’s perspectives remain widespread and relatively consistent over time: first, considering a return to Myanmar as being an important part of obtaining justice; and second, holding incorrect assumptions about the ability of the various international courts and mechanisms to make that happen. These beliefs were deeply entrenched, with post-session conversations indicating that participants remained sceptical that these mechanisms would not help them return home—having been told for many years that the purpose of the courts was to deliver them ‘justice’.

VIII. Conclusion and Recommendations

In determining what these lessons teach us about the ability of international justice to serve female victims of conflict, it is necessary to consider both the short- and medium-term actions that could be taken to better address the needs of Rohingya women, and to contemplate what these findings mean for international justice mechanisms more generally and in the longer term. When it comes to the Rohingya, it is too late to meaningfully involve camp-based women in conversations about the opening of the ICC, ICJ or Argentina cases or the establishment of the IIMM. However, as these mechanisms continue their mandate, it is possible for their representatives to begin having honest conversations with camp-based women about what they can and cannot achieve—emphasizing that their mandates do not extend to helping the Rohingya return to Myanmar. It is also possible for these mechanisms to establish and ensure continued engagement with Rohingya community groups and leaders, including proportionate representation from groups led by men, women and Hijra (a gender non-binary group). Where the ICC and IIMM have resources available to engage with civil society, they should prioritize directing these towards camp-based groups. The Argentine court, which was previously engaging only with BROUK, but which has now recognized Rohingya in the camp as having standing, could establish a more sustained engagement with victims—beyond hearing their evidence as witnesses. The teams litigating before the ICJ could reach out to the Rohingya in the camp, to discuss with them what they want out of the case. The ICC, IIMM and Argentine court could consider investigating and prosecuting low-level perpetrators of sexual violence, in line with the priorities given by many of the women through this process.

In improving their efforts to engage with the victims, each of these mechanisms should be aware that only Rohingya who lived through the clearance operations—most of whom reside in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp—can legitimately represent the victim community. They must also recognize that female Rohingya leaders face additional barriers to providing this representation, in comparison to male leaders and male-led groups within the camp. Assistance from the international community should therefore include funding and resources for camp-based, women-led Rohingya organizations.

More generally, findings such as these—which have been made not only with the Rohingya but in victim communities around the world (O’Connell, 2005; Robins, 2017: 44)—should trigger a strategic rethink about how international justice institutions can best serve victim populations. At the centre of this recalibration should be practical and genuine efforts made to let victims explain what justice means to them, before designing a process or opening an investigation on their behalf. When conducting pre-investigation consultations with affected communities, for example, the VPRS could carry out a longer, more comprehensive process, focused on understanding how the affected victims conceptualize justice. Findings about these perceptions should be disaggregated by gender, as well as other identity factors. Where victims do not prioritize criminal justice and would prefer UN funding and resources to be directed towards some other outcome—such as repatriation or resettlement—this should be taken seriously. The ICC’s Trust Fund for Victims (TFV) has an Assistance Mandate, which allows the TFV to provide assistance to victim communities before the conclusion of cases. This fund should be one of the Court’s most important components: it could develop its capacity to speak to victims about what they want and need; be better resourced and utilized; and put processes in place to evaluate the impact of its work. States wishing to take a case to the ICJ on the basis of human rights violations could extensively discuss this possibility with victim communities before doing so—and could ensure their vision for justice and reparations is reflected in the requests made to the Court. Lawyers taking cases on the basis of UJ could make an effort to obtain instructions from victims in the country where the crimes were committed—rather than only from the Diaspora active in the country where the case is heard.

Beyond these practical strategies, international justice actors should ask themselves whether victim-centred transitional justice is truly possible when it is being facilitated by processes that are pre-determined, and based on conceptualizations of justice held by people outside of the victim community. In no context can international lawyers, human rights organizations, UN actors or Diaspora groups claim to legitimately and accurately represent the wants and needs of victims. In many contexts, victim groups need substantial investment and support—best provided by members of their own community—to even participate in the conversation about what justice means to them. It is up to the international justice community to have those conversations and to ensure they truly understand the input of the victim community before they embark on justice processes that are incapable of delivering to the very populations they are intended to serve.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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