Burma
Amid the conflict in Myanmar, various organizations are documenting serious human rights violations that have displaced thousands of civilians, including more than 700,000 Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh.
In this context, the FAFG supports community-based initiatives to document missing, murdered, or presumed dead persons in order to aid in identification processes. Since 2022, it has overseen a Rohingya-led initiative in Cox's Bazar, where genetic information is collected. In 2024, it also partnered with ND-Burma to train local organizations in multidisciplinary forensic science.
Human rights organizations in Myanmar operate under extremely insecure conditions and are often the first to document violations and incidents committed across the country by the military junta and armed groups. Following the military coup of February 2021, widespread and systematic abuses have exacerbated the ongoing human rights crisis. Reports indicate that these crimes and abuses include arbitrary detentions, torture, extrajudicial killings, and indiscriminate attacks against civilians through aerial bombardments, airstrikes, and scorched-earth tactics across the country.
Many organizations have created networks to systematize their documentation and better advocate for and raise awareness of the unfolding situation in Myanmar. The FAFG has partnered with the Network for Human Rights Documentation Burma, known as ND-Burma , to provide training to human rights organizations to enhance their understanding of how applying multidisciplinary forensic science can strengthen their investigations and meet the needs of victims' families to gather evidence and seek the truth.
Since 2022, FAFG has supported a Rohingya-led initiative to document victims and create a genetic database for future human identification efforts. In the “Rohingya Victim Documentation Initiative in Bangladesh” program, FAFG collaborates with a local Bangladeshi organization, Social Action of Voluntary Efforts (SAVE), to facilitate the necessary resources and authorizations for a Rohingya-led project in the Cox’s Bazar camps to document missing, killed, or presumed dead victims and collect DNA samples for future human identification efforts.
The FAFG trained a team of 40 Rohingya as victim investigators, based in four refugee camps in the Cox's Bazar area of Bangladesh. The Rohingya investigators document each victim through an antemortem interview that gathers their social and biological profile, and collect buccal DNA samples from available relatives to populate a genetic database of Rohingya families. Since June 2023, the Rohingya investigators have documented more than 1,200 victims from 885 families and collected more than 4,250 DNA samples to populate the Rohingya family genetic database, in order to facilitate future human identification of victims.
