UN investigator says he does not have permission to go to Myanmar
Geneva: The head of the UN fact-finding mission probing violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state said on Tuesday he is still waiting for permission to enter the country.
‘We have not been able to proceed further in planning the presence of a fact-finding team on the ground until there is a clear signal from the government of Myanmar that the fact-finding mission is in fact enabled to access into the country,’ Marzuki Darusman told the UN Human Rights Council.
‘We continue to hold hopes, high hopes in fact, that this may be resolved.’
The head of a United Nations investigation into violence in Myanmar asked the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday for more time to probe allegations of mass killings, torture, sexual violence, the use of landmines and the burning of villages.
‘We will go where the evidence leads us,’ the fact-finding mission’s chairman Marzuki Darusman said, before requesting a six-month extension of the investigation to September 2018.
Myanmar’s ambassador Htin Lynn said Darusman’s investigation was ‘not a helpful course of action’ and said Myanmar was taking proportionate security measures against terrorists, and was making efforts to restore peace.