BANGKOK:- Amnesty International says the Rohingyas in Myanmar continue to face severe restrictions on their movements with limited access to health care and are denied education and employment as well as citizenship right.
Most of them remained deprived of citizenship under the country’s 1982 Citizenship law, the international human rights organisation said in its International Annual Report 2015/2016 released today.
The report said that in February last year Myanmar announced the revocations of all Temporary Registration Cards (TRC) or better known as “White Cards”, leaving the Rohingyas without any identity documents.
The move barred Rohingyas and other former holders of the TRC from participating in the country November’s election and the exclusion was further cemented by the disqualification of those from the ethnicities who applied to be candidates, Amnesty International added.
It also said that the deteriorating situation faced by the Rohingyas in Myanmar had forced increasing number of them to leave the country.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had estimated that about 33,000 Rohingyas as well as Bangladeshi nationals left the Bay of Bengal by boat during last year, the report said.
“In May, a crackdown of trafficking in Thailand saw thousands of people – many Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar – stranded at sea on overcrowded boats controlled by traffickers and people smugglers. Many were beaten and held hostage for ransom,” Amnesty International said.
Besides Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar, the report, citing the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said that there were also 230,000 internally displace people (IDP) in the country.
Of the overall number of the IDP in Myanmar, 130,000 of them were mostly Rohingya in Rakhine State, displaced since violence erupted there in 2012, it said.
The Amnesty International report also said that Myanmar has rejected key recommendations to review specific laws including refusing to acknowledge the systemic discriminations facing the Rohingya minority.
According to the report, the United Nation’s Special Rappoteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar made two official visits to the country last year but was hampered in carrying out the mandate including denied access to Rakhine State.
The Amnesty International Report 2015/2016 documents the state of world’s human right during 2015, involving regional overviews and survey of 160 countries
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