Summary 13 Rohingya and foreign aid workers in northern Rakhine State also told Fortify Rights that Rohingya staff were unable to identify as Rohingya within their organizations and in the workplace. “I was not able to say I was Rohingya in my place of work,” a 37-year-old Rohingya told Fortify Rights. “I was unable to say it at meetings or to people I would work with.” H.K., 75, from Maungdaw Township in Myanmar’s Rakhine State shows a copy of her household list provided by Myanmar authorities as part of annual household surveys, which are commonly abusive exercises. Many Rohingya have no other form of identification. “I saw no one was taking the NVC . . . I was afraid and also decided not to take it.” ©Saiful Huq Omi, Counter Foto, Cox’s Bazar District, Bangladesh, August 2019 Current senior staff of humanitarian organizations operational in northern Rakhine State spoke about an ongoing “culture of silence” and “an environment of selfcensoring” and said that the incidents documented by Fortify Rights are not the result of explicit policies within the organizations. However, senior U.N. officials and diplomats have privately and publicly supported the NVC process and its earlier iterations, despite that the process violates the Rohingya right to a nationality, the principle of non-discrimination, and other fundamental rights. Most recently, in January 2019, U.N. Special Envoy to Myanmar Christine Schraner Burgener issued a statement in which she failed to use the term “Rohingya” and “encouraged the internally displaced people she met to consider applying for [NVC] registration.” The FFM, on the other hand, described the NVC process in September 2018 as “protracted, cumbersome and increasingly coercive.”

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