Geneva,
30 May 2017
-- The President of the Human Rights Council, Ambassador Joaquín Alexander
Maza Martelli (El Salvador), announced today the appointment of Ms. Indira
Jaising (India), Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy (Sri Lanka) and Mr. Christopher
Dominic Sidoti (Australia) to serve as the three members of the Fact-finding
Mission on Myanmar. Ms. Jaising will serve as Chair of the three-person
mission.
On 24 March 2017, at
its thirty-fourth session, the Council decided to urgently dispatch an
independent international fact-finding mission, to be appointed by the
President of the Council, to “establish facts and circumstances of the alleged
recent human rights violations by military and security forces, and abuses, in
Myanmar, in particular in Rakhine State”.
Through Human Rights
Council resolution 34/22, the 47-member
body mandated the members of the mission to look into, inter alia,
allegations of arbitrary detention, torture and inhuman treatment, rape and
other forms of sexual violence, extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary killings,
enforced disappearances, forced displacement and unlawful destruction of
property. The mission members, who will serve in their personal capacities, are
also mandated to carry out their work with a view to ensuring full
accountability for the perpetrators of these acts and justice for the victims.
The Council also
encouraged the Government of Myanmar to fully cooperate with the fact-finding
mission by making available the findings of their domestic investigations and
by granting full, unrestricted and unmonitored access to all areas and
interlocutors. The Council also stressed the need for the mission to be
provided with all necessary resources and expertise necessary to carry out its
mandate.
The fact-finding
mission is scheduled to present an oral update to the Human Rights Council at
its thirty-sixth session in September this year and a full report at its
thirty-seventh session in March 2018.
The members of the
Mission are expected to meet in Geneva in the coming weeks to plan their agenda
and work for the months ahead.
Biographies
of the members of the Fact-finding Mission on Myanmar
Ms.
Indira Jaising (India) is an advocate of the Supreme Court of India, and former
CEDAW member (2009-2012). She co-founded the Lawyers Collective in 1981, an NGO
devoted to the defence of human rights and women’s rights. She was India’s
first woman to be designated a Senior Advocate by the High Court of Bombay in
1986, and first female Additional Solicitor General of the country from 2009
until 2014. She drafted India’s first domestic violence act, allowing women to
bring civil and criminal suits against attackers for the first time. She
graduated in law with an LLB degree in 1964. Ms. Jaising holds a post graduate
degree in law from University of Bombay and received a fellowship from the
Institute of Advanced Legal studies of the University of London in 1970. She
has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University New York, and Bok Visiting
International Professor at University of Pennsylvania (2015).
Ms.
Radhika Coomaraswamy (Sri Lanka) is a lawyer by training and a civil society member of the
Constitutional Council, formerly the Chairperson of the Sri Lanka Human Rights
Commission (2003-2006) and the Director of the International Centre for Ethnic
Studies (1984-2006). She has worked as the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence
against Women (1994-2003), and as Under-Secretary-General and Special
Representative for Children and Armed Conflict (2006-2012). In 2014, Ms.
Coomaraswamy was appointed by the Un Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon as lead
author on the Global Study on the implementation of UNSC Resolution 1325, on
Women, Peace and Security. As an academic, she is a Global Professor of Law at
the New York University School of Law. She received her B.A. from Yale
University, her J.D. from Columbia University, an LL.M. from Harvard University
and honorary PhDs from Amherst College, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the
University of Edinburgh, University of Ulster, the University of Essex and the
CUNY School of Law, amongst others.
Mr.
Christopher Dominic Sidoti (Australia) is an international human rights consultant,
specializing in the international human rights system and in national human
rights institutions who, since 2000, has provided consultancy services on human
rights law and practices to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights, UNDP, UNICEF, the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights
Institutions and several national human rights institutions. He was director of
the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR; 2003-2007), served as
Australian Human Rights Commissioner (1995-2000), Australian Law Reform
Commissioner (1992-1995) and Foundation Director of the Australian Human Rights
and Equal Opportunity Commission (1987-1992). From 1999 to 2013 he was
principal facilitator and interlocutor in a human rights initiative between the
Government of Australia and the Government of Myanmar. He is an Adjunct
Professor at the University of Western Sydney, Griffith University
(Queensland), University of the Sunshine Coast (Queensland) and the Australian
Catholic University. Mr. Sidoti holds a Bachelor of Arts, major in government,
and a Bachelor of Laws.