The Myanmar government is practising 'apartheid' against the Rohingya minority, and international actions are needed to 'dismantle' the system, Amnesty International says in a report.
"Myanmar authorities have imposed a systematic and state-sponsored system of segregation and discrimination on Rohingya, with all aspects of their lives severely restricted and their rights being violated on a daily basis," said Anna Neistat, Amnesty International's senior director for research.
"We have concluded that this system amounts to a crime against humanity of apartheid," Neistat added, citing a two-year investigation involving multiple field trips and interviews with hundreds of people.
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The rights watchdog said systematic discrimination was "clearly linked to their ethnic (or racial) identity, and therefore legally constitutes apartheid, a crime against humanity under international law."
The group also called for the international community to take measures against such discriminations.
"As clearly defined in the Convention against Apartheid, it is a joint responsibility of the international community to address such [a] situation," Neistat said.
The measures may include an embargo, targeted financial sanctions and suspension of military relations, the rights group suggested.
According to the group's report titled Caged Without A Roof, a "deliberate campaign" by the government to strip Rohingya of what little identification documents they possess, making it cumbersome to register newborn babies and deleting names from official records if people were not home for "population checks."
The group revealed that the minority Muslim population of about 1.1 million is denied citizenship under Myanmar's 1982 Citizenship Law and the government refers to them as "Bengalis," to infer that they are interlopers from Bangladesh.
According to the report, Rohingya are regularly denied access to healthcare facilities in Rakhine state, where most live, and restrictions on movement, including curfews, inhibit their abilities to earn money, visit family, or practise their religion.
They have also been subject to arbitrary arrests, beatings, and extrajudicial killings.
The human rights monitor warned that this would make it "virtually impossible" for Rohingya refugees to return to their homes.
The report comes as Myanmar and Bangladesh discuss repatriating some 620,000 Rohingya Muslims who fled a crackdown launched by the Myanmar army in August and which has been labelled an example of ethnic cleansing by the United Nations.
