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Genocide is the most serious charge that can be made against a government and that’s why it’s rarely proposed by UN investigators. But a recent UN report calls for the top military figures in Myanmar to be prosecuted for exactly this charge - genocide in Rakhine state and crimes against humanity in other areas. The UN has reached these damning conclusions based on hundreds of sources including eyewitness interviews, satellite imagery, photographs and videos.

Whether or not the whole international community agrees that the atrocities in Myanmar should be called a genocide, it will be much harder now to ignore or dismiss the extent of killings and human rights abuses which the Rohingya have suffered. Giving an act a particular name shifts our consciousness and our attitude towards the perpetrators and the victims. What caught my eye when reading about the report was the word denial, that despite the governments’ insistence that its operations were targeted, the crimes documented are described as "shocking for the level of denial and impunity that is attached to them."

Living with denial is part of the human coping mechanism, often a refusal to accept the truth about ourselves. But alongside the military and state organisations it seems to me that religious communities also deny the problem of certain practices and look to protecting themselves from criminal charges under the guise of tradition, values and culture. Years ago, I was approached in my academic role, to write a legal report explaining the actions of an elderly Muslim man who’d killed his daughter in a fit of rage when he found out she had a boyfriend. Despite my insistence that I had no intention of writing anything which would exonerate this man from the crime of murder, the defence solicitor kept asking ` but what about cultural and religious expectations, what about an old man’s honour?’ The man was imprisoned for life and I understood then how important it was to say clearly that certain acts were quite simply crimes, that religious communities couldn’t hide abuse and violence in the language of honour and values.

To speak of repentance and forgiveness for sins is simply not the same as ensuring that people are held accountable under the law and pay for their crimes. I’ve often wondered how one balances divine and human justice but maybe the multiple Qur’anic commands to be just for ` God loves the just’ find meaning precisely when we acknowledge abusive practices in our own faith cultures and wider society and try to change things for the better. We may not always get justice right but there’s no bigger struggle. And in the case of the Rohingya and the UN report, I’m reminded of the writer Lois Bujold who said that `the dead cannot cry out for justice, it is the duty of the living to do so for them.’

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