Key contributing factors The boat crisis is rooted in core, fundamental problems that have yet to find practical solutions on an international or regional scale. With a growing risk of recurrence of genocide intensified by an ongoing war in Rakhine State, the dire human rights and humanitairan crisis in Myanmar is forcing many more Rohingya to be trafficked and smuggled into deadly sea crossings. In Bangladesh, where already poor conditions of safety, protection, and access to basic services continue to deteriorate by the day, Rohingya refugees are increasingly given no choice but to escape by boat. Even after being forced into boats, Rohingya refugees remain denied access to the refuge that they seek in jurisdictions across the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal; such may be the case due to, among many other factors, the South and Southeast Asian region lacking in comprehensive refugee and human rights frameworks, and a coordinated approach to address the boat crisis. Myanmar: Decades-long impunity and risk of recurrence of genocide The approximately 600,000 Rohingya remaining in Myanmar continue to bear the brunt of the country’s lack of measures for accountability. This pattern can be observed throughout the era of military dictatorships to the years of a supposed democratic transition prior to the Burmese military’s attempted coup, during which Rohingya were stripped of their political, social, economic, citizenship, and voting rights, as well as their freedom of movement.49 Such unfettered, targeted acts of persecution against Rohingya put them in a disproportionately vulnerable and marginalized position relative to the wider Burmese society, including other ethnic and religious minorities.50 As a result, waves of state-sponsored violence, as well as attacks of genocide, followed. It is of no coincidence that boat departures surged in the years after the 2012 wave of violence against Rohingya, their subsequent internment in internally displaced persons’ camps (“IDP camps”), and the 2017 “clearance operations” against them in Rakhine State. The same, vicious cycle of impunity enabled the Burmese military to launch an attempted coup in February 2021, commit atrocities (likely amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity) across Myanmar and, at the same time, proceed with its agenda of eradicating the Rohingya ethnic minority.51 The military continues to impose and uphold measures and policies of persecution against Rohingya, including greater domination and control over their lives, especially in Rakhine State.52 This is despite the already highly militarized control of the region’s squalid IDP camps, where around 140,000 Rohingya 49 United Nations, Human Rights Council, Report of the independent international fact-finding mission on Myanmar, A/HRC/42/50 (8 August 2019), available from undocs.org/en/A/HRC/42/50; Burma’s Path to Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, last accessed March 4, 2024, https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/burmas-path-to-genocide. 50 Ibid. 51 United Nations, Human Rights Council, Report of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, A/HRC/59/19 (30 June 2023), available from undocs.org/en/A/HRC/59/19. 52 United Nations, Human Rights Council, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, A/HRC/52/66 (9 March 2023), available from undocs.org/en/A/HRC/52/66. 12