Canadian lawmakers have unanimously voted to declare crimes committed against Rohingya Muslims by the Myanmar military to be genocide.

The House of Commons endorsed on Thursday the findingsof a UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar that found “crimes against humanity have been committed against the Rohingya” and that these acts were sanctioned by top Myanmar military commanders.

Who are the Rohingya?
In a motion, Canadian lawmakers said they “recognise that these crimes against the Rohingya constitute genocide”.

Rights organisations have accused Myanmar military of committing extrajudicial killings, gang rape, and arson during their bloody campaign launched in August last year after army posts came under attack from Rohingya rebels.

More than 700,000 Rohingya people have forced to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh, where they now live in cramped refugee camps.

They also urged the UN Security Council to refer the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC), while also calling for Myanmar’s generals to be investigated and prosecuted “for the crime of genocide”.

“I want to underscore how tragic, how horrific the crimes against the Rohingya are,” Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said. “We are leading an international effort for justice and accountability for the Rohingya.”

Human rights observers called the declaration as a significant milestone.

The UN report published last month said military generals, including Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing, must face investigation and prosecution for “genocidal intent” in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state, as well as crimes against humanity and other war crimes in the states of Kachin and Shan.

Myanmar denies any organised abuses.

Bangladesh and Myanmar signed an agreement last year to repatriate the Muslim minority – but it has stalled as the Rohingya fear returning to Myanmar’s Rakhine State without their safety and rights guaranteed.

Aljazeera

The White House has announced the schedule of US President Donald Trump regarding the upcoming UN General Assembly next week.

According to a statement of the White House on Thursday, Trump will participate in a slew of UN General Assembly (UNGA) events and bilateral meetings from September 24-27, Xinhua news agency reported.

On September 24, he will make remarks at the “Global Call to Action on the World Drug Problem” event to talk about counter-narcotics issue and receive heads of state coming to attend the meeting.

On September 25, he will address the 73rd Session of the UNGA, have pull-asides with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the president of the 73rd Session of the UNGA, Maria Fernanda Espinosa, and attend US Ambassador Nikki Haley’s Security Council Presidency Reception.

On September 26, Trump will give remarks at a United Nations Security Council briefing he chaired to discuss counter-proliferation.

Trump has so far been confirmed to participate in bilateral meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, French President Emmanuel Macron, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and British Prime Minister Theresa May, the White House added.

IANS

While India has taken tremendous strides in combating poverty in the past decade, Muslims, members of the Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Dalits saw the most progress in in reducing the impact of poverty, according to data compiled in a UN project.

The “very positive trend” during the decade between 2005-06 and 2015-16 in India is that “the poorest are catching up”, Sabina Alkire, Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHDI), said on Thursday at the presentation of the 2018 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) here.

The MPI prepared by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the OPHDI, takes into account various indicators of development rather than just income and aligns them to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, while serving as a measure of the intensity of poverty felt by different groups.

While ST members were still the poorest group, they have seen the fastest reduction in MPI, as have the Dalits, Alkire said.

Explaining it, Diego Zavaleta Reyles from OPHDI told IANS that the average number of deprivations or “the intensity of their poverty” measured by the MPI fell for these groups even though the proportion of poor people in these categories was relatively the same or unchanged.

Between 2006 and 2016, the MPI of the STs came down from 0.447 to 0.229 even though the percentage had fallen only from 79.8 to 50 during the decade, according to OPHDI data.

During the same period, the MPI of Dalits fell from 0.338 to 0.145 while the percentage of poor came down from 65 to 32.9.

“If we look at the religious groups, the Muslims are the poorest and they again had the fastest reduction in MPI,” Alkire said.

While MPI for Muslims was 0.331 in 2006, it fell to 0.144 in 2016, and the percentage of the poor in the community came down from 60.3 per cent to 31.1 per cent.

Nationally, 54.7 per cent of the people in all groups taken together were poor in 2006, but only 27.5 per cent in 2016, and the MPI came down from 0.279 to 0.121, the data show.

In terms of numbers, 271 million people had moved out of poverty during the decade, with the number of poor people coming down 635 million in 2005-06 to 364 million according to the MPI standards.

But “we are seeing a shift of global proportions occurring in India over a ten-year period and that is really encouraging”, Alkire said.

India is the only country for which changes of this magnitude are taking place at this time, she added.

Bihar remains the poorest state, but along with other high-poverty states – Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Chhatisgarh – had the fastest reduction in multi-dimensional poverty, she said.

In spite of the progress, these states still remain the poorest.

Among age groups, children, who are still the poorest, saw the fastest reduction in MPI, she said.

Such reduction in poverty among these groups or states did had not happened in India in the earlier periods according to a previous study for the period 1998-1999 to 2005-06, she said.

UNDP Administrator Adam Steiner said that when governments start looking carefully at who the poor are and where they are, the analysis leads to programmes that help the poorest of the poor, whether by ethnicity, religion or geography, and results like those in India can be achieved.

Traditional poverty measures – often calculated by numbers of people who earn less than $1.90 a day – shed light on how little people earn but not on whether or how they experience poverty in their day-to-day lives, according to UNDP.

On the other hand, MPI takes into account health, education and living standards in areas like access to clean water, sanitation, nutrition and primary education, with those lacking in at least a third of these defined as multi-dimensionally poor.

According to the income-based measurement, only 270 million Indians are considered poor but according to the MPI standards a far larger number – 364 million — were categorised as multi-dimensionally poor in 2016.

(IANS)

At least 44 people were killed when a passenger ferry carrying hundreds capsized in Tanzania’s Lake Victoria, officials said.

The accident took place on Thursday between two islands in Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa, which straddles the borders of Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, reports CNN.

The exact number of those on board wasn’t immediately known because the ferry was overloaded, according to media reports.

Reports varied but the ferry may have carried between 400 and 500 people.

By Thursday night, 37 people had been pulled out of the water by emergency teams during a rescue operation, which was halted because of poor visibility.

Regional Commissioner John Mongella told Tanzanian television channel ITV that emergency teams would continue their search on Friday morning.

Boat disasters are frequent on Tanzania’s waters, where ferries often exceed their capacity.

Some 200 people were killed after an overloaded vessel hit strong winds off the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean in 2011.

The boat had a capacity of 620 passengers but was carrying over 1,000 people.

(IANS)