Violent repression of the largely Muslim Rohingya population in Myanmar amounts to genocide, US secretary of state Antony Blinken has said.

The declaration is intended to both generate international pressure and lay the groundwork for potential legal action.

Authorities made the determination based on confirmed accounts of mass atrocities on civilians by Myanmar’s military in a widespread and systematic campaign against the ethnic minority, Mr Blinken said in a speech at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

It is the eighth time since the Holocaust that the US has concluded a genocide has occurred, the secretary of state said, noting the importance of calling attention to inhumanity even as horrific attacks occur elsewhere in the world, including Ukraine.

“Yes, we stand with the people of Ukraine,” he said.

“And we must also stand with people who are suffering atrocities in other places.”

The government of Myanmar, also known as Burma, is already under multiple layers of US sanctions since a military coup ousted the democratically elected government in February 2021.

Thousands of civilians throughout the country have been killed and imprisoned as part of an ongoing campaign of repression against anyone opposed to the ruling junta.

More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from Buddhist-majority Myanmar to refugee camps in Bangladesh since August 2017, when the Myanmar military launched a clearance operation in response to attacks by a rebel group.

Myanmar security forces have been accused of mass rapes, killings and the burning of thousands of homes.

US State Department experts have documented instances of Myanmar’s military razing villages and carrying out rapes, tortures and mass killings of civilians since at least 2016.

The determination that a genocide has occurred could lead to additional international pressure on the government, which is already facing accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

“As we lay the foundation for future accountability, we’re also working to stop the military’s ongoing atrocities, and support the people of Burma as they strive to put the country back on the path to democracy,” Mr Blinken said.

Human rights groups and legislators have been pressing both the then-Trump and Biden administrations to make the designation, and they welcomed the announcement.

“The US determination of the crime of genocide against us is a momentous moment and must lead to concrete action to hold the Burmese military accountable for their crimes,” said Tun Khin, president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK.

Previous determinations of genocide by the US include campaigns against Uighurs and other largely Muslim minorities in China as well as in Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq and Darfur.

Boris Johnson is seeking to avert a Tory revolt over allegations of genocide in China by backing a compromise plan put forward by a senior Conservative.

The Government has been involved in a parliamentary battle over proposals to outlaw trade deals with countries that are committing genocide – a dispute taking place at a time when the Chinese authorities’ activities in Xinjiang are under intense international scrutiny.

Ministers have insisted that decisions on trade deals and international relations should not be matters for the courts.

But peers have refused to back down over amendments to the Trade Bill which would force ministers to withdraw from any free trade agreement with any country which the High Court rules is committing genocide.

The House of Lords reinserted the trade safeguard, proposed by crossbench peer Lord Alton, into the legislation after the Prime Minister was able to narrowly overturn it in the Commons.

The Bill returns to the Commons on Tuesday, with Conservative MPs demanding action – particularly in light of recent reports of abuses being carried out against the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.

The Government will back a compromise plan put forward by Sir Bob Neill, chairman of the Commons Justice Select Committee, which would put the matter in the hands of parliamentarians rather than judges.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “The Government shares the grave concerns about human rights abuses in Xinjiang behind Lord Alton’s amendment and understands the strength of feeling on this issue.

“However, that amendment could embroil the courts in the formulation of trade policy and conduct of international relations and risks undermining the separation of powers.

“The amendment put forward by the chair of the select committee, which the Government will be supporting, addresses the concerns raised by the parliamentarians to take a stand on credible reports of genocide by a prospective trade partner while ensuring a specific duty on government to act.”

Sir Bob’s amendment would mean a debate and vote could be held in Parliament on credible allegations of genocide.

The first stage would be a report from a Commons committee setting out the claims of genocide, which would then prompt a ministerial response.

If that response was not deemed to be sufficient, the Government would have to provide time for a debate in the Commons, with similar arrangements in the Lords.

Meanwhile, Downing Street stressed the need for academics to comply with laws on international exports following reports that almost 200 experts are being investigated on suspicion of unwittingly helping the Chinese government build weapons of mass destruction.

The Times reported they are suspected of violating strict export laws intended to prevent intellectual property in highly sensitive subjects being handed to hostile states.

The Prime Minister’s spokesman said: “Exporters of military goods and those engaged in the transfer of military technology including universities and academics require a licence to export or transfer from the UK.

“It’s obviously vitally important that universities and academics comply with relevant export control but I don’t have anything further to add.”

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has imposed new sanctions on China and said its policies on Muslims and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang constitute a “genocide”.

Mr Pompeo made the determination just 24 hours before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. There was no immediate response from the incoming Biden team, although several members have been sympathetic to such a designation in the past.

Many of those accused of having taken part in repression in Xinjiang are already under US sanctions, and Tuesday’s move is the latest in a series of steps the outgoing Trump administration has taken against China.

Since last year, the administration has steadily ramped up pressure on Beijing, imposing sanctions on numerous officials and companies for their activities in Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong and the South China Sea.

Those penalties have become harsher since the beginning of last year when President Donald Trump and Mr Pompeo began to accuse China of trying to cover up the coronavirus pandemic.

On Saturday, Mr Pompeo lifted restrictions on US diplomatic contacts with Taiwanese officials, prompting a stern rebuke from China, which regards the island as a renegade province.

Five days ago, the administration announced it would halt imports of cotton and tomatoes from Xinjiang with Customs and Border Protection officials saying they would block products from there suspected of being produced with forced labour.

Xinjiang is a major global supplier of cotton, so the order could have significant effects on international commerce. The Trump administration has already blocked imports from individual companies linked to forced labour in the region, and the US has imposed sanctions on Communist Party officials with prominent roles in the campaign.

China has imprisoned more than a million people, including Uighurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups, in a vast network of concentration camps, according to US officials and human rights groups.

People have been subjected to torture, sterilisation and political indoctrination in addition to forced labour as part of an assimilation campaign in a region whose inhabitants are ethnically and culturally distinct from the Han Chinese majority.

China has denied all the charges, but Uighur forced labour has been linked by reporting from The Associated Press to various products imported to the US, including clothing and electronic goods such as cameras and computer monitors.

China says its policies in Xinjiang aim only to promote economic and social development in the region and stamp out radicalism. It also rejects criticism of what it considers its internal affairs.

Read more: Anger as China says that it is freeing Uighur women from being ‘baby making machine’

Social media, including Facebook, must proactively block content inciting hatred and prevent online campaigns which target minorities, such as those undertaken in Myanmar, the United Nations human rights chief said on Wednesday.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, was speaking after U.N. experts accused Myanmar generals of “genocidal intent” and said Facebook had allowed its platform to be used to incite violence against Rohingya.

Facebook said on Monday it was removing several Myanmar military officials from the social media website and an Instagram account to prevent the spread of “hate and misinformation” after reviewing the content.

Zeid, whose spokesman said he has met with major tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Facebook and Google, in recent months, was speaking to a news conference before his four-year term ends on Aug. 31.

Zeid said he didn’t feel Facebook took the issue seriously at first but that the company’s attitude began to change after Yanghee Lee, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, told a Geneva press conference in March that Facebook was being used in the country to spread hate speech.

“But it shouldn’t be because the press or the human rights community highlights the problem for them then suddenly to respond. They should be aware of it ahead of time,” he said.

“So I don’t think they should wait until the crisis begins. They should be thinking proactively about what steps they will take to mitigate that,” he added.

Facebook said on Monday that while it was too slow to act in the case of Myanmar, it was now making progress, with better technology to identify hate speech and improved reporting tools.

However, Zeid said there was a danger that social media could be over-regulated in a way that breaches human rights law including the right to freedom of expression.

Tech giants should “keep the broadest space available and open to the exercise of freedom of expression”, relying on international human rights law for regulation, he said.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused Google’s search engine of promoting negative news articles and hiding “fair media” coverage of him, vowing to address the situation without providing evidence or giving details of action he might take.

Trump’s attack against the Alphabet Inc. unit follows a string of grievances against technology companies, including Twitter Inc and Facebook, which he has accused of silencing conservative voices.

Skulls and other remains of massacred tribespeople used in the colonial era for experiments to push claims of European racial superiority were handed over by Germany to Namibia at a church ceremony in Berlin.

In what historians call the first genocide of the 20th century, soldiers of German Kaiser Wilhelm slaughtered some 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama tribespeople in a 1904-08 campaign after a revolt against land seizures by German colonists.

At Wednesday’s ceremony, a Namibian delegation received the skulls and bones from German Foreign Ministry representatives. They will be taken to the Namibian capital Windhoek on Aug. 31 where rituals will be carried out.

“Today, we want to do what should have been done many years ago – to give back to their descendants the remains of people who became victims of the first genocide of the 20th century,” said Petra Bosse-Huber, a German Protestant bishop.

Namibian Education Minister Katrina Hanse-Himarwa said last week that the government would create a group to decide whether to bury or display the repatriated skulls that had been kept in German museums.

Germany has acknowledged “moral responsibility” for the killings but to avoid compensation claims, has avoided making an official apology for the massacres.

Esther Utjiua Muinjangue, chairwoman of the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, said the handover ceremony would have been the perfect opportunity for Germany to officially apologise.

“Is that asking too much? I don’t think so,” she told reporters in Berlin earlier this week.

Ignored for decades, Germany’s colonial history is drawing increasing attention. A couple of years ago, the German Historical Museum curated a big exhibition on the subject.

Germany, which lost all its colonial territories after World War One, was the third biggest colonial power after Britain and France, which lost theirs after World War Two.

During its 1904-08 campaign in what was then German South West Africa, the German Reich sent reinforcements to put down an uprising by tribespeople over their expulsion from their land and recruitment into forced labour. The Hereros had killed 123 German traders, settlers and soldiers.

In addition to the slaughter, thousands of Hereros were driven into the desert and died of thirst and starvation, and the rest were sent to concentration camps.

Legal representatives for the Herero and Nama people have brought a lawsuit against Germany in New York over genocide and property seizure carried out by German colonists.

The German government has entered negotiations with the Namibian government over possible reparations for the genocide but the lawsuit argues that Germany violated international law on the rights of indigenous peoples.

A U.N. investigative team that will collect and preserve evidence of acts by Islamic State in Iraq that may be war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide started work this week, nearly a year after the Security Council created it.

At last September’s annual U.N. gathering of world leaders, the council unanimously adopted a British-drafted resolution – after a year of talks with Iraq – asking U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to create the team “to support domestic efforts” to hold the militants accountable.

U.N. experts had warned in June 2016 that Islamic State was committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq to destroy the minority religious community through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes.

Guterres notified the 15-member Security Council in a letter that the U.N. team, led by British lawyer Karim Asad Ahmad Khan, would start work on Aug. 20.

Guterres announced in May that he had appointed Khan after the Security Council approved the scope and limitations for the team in February. He said in the letter, released on Thursday, that Khan visited Iraq earlier this month.

Use of evidence collected by the team in other venues, such as international courts, would “be determined in agreement with the Government of Iraq on a case-by-case basis.” Evidence is for primary use by Iraqi authorities, followed by “competent national-level courts,” according to the 2017 U.N. resolution.

International human rights lawyer Amal Clooney and Nadia Murad, a young Yazidi woman who was enslaved and raped by Islamic State fighters in Mosul, have long pushed Iraq to allow U.N. investigators to help.

Islamic State, which until last year controlled large areas in Syria and Iraq, has since been driven into the desert by successive defeats in offensives by international allies in both countries. The U.N. investigative team’s mission does not include Syria.

Irish musician and activist Bob Geldof called Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi “a hand maiden to genocide” on Monday as he returned his Freedom of the City of Dublin award in protest over his fellow recipient’s response to the repression of Rohingya Muslims.

“I don’t want to be on a very select roll of wonderful people with a killer,” Geldof told state broadcaster RTE. “Someone who is at best a handmaiden to genocide and an accomplice to murder.”

More than 600,000 Muslims from Myanmar’s Rakhine state have fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh after military operations described by the United Nations as ethnic cleansing.

Their plight has drawn outrage around the world. But Suu Kyi, long seen as a champion of human rights, has been criticised for failing to speak out against violence. There have been calls for her to be stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1991.

Suu Kyi was given the Freedom of Dublin in 1999 while she was held under house arrest by Myanmar’s then military government. She received her award at a reception in Ireland in 2012, two years after her release.

“Her association with our city shames us all and we should have no truck with it, even by default. We honoured her, now she appals and shames us,” Geldof said in a statement.

The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Micheal Mac Donncha, said the city council had discussed taking away the honour and the matter was still under review. Last month she was stripped of a similar honour by the British university city of Oxford, where she was an undergraduate.

But Mac Donncha, a councillor for the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party, also criticised Geldof’s gesture, saying it was ironic as Geldof held a British knighthood despite “the shameful record of British imperialism across the globe”.

The former Boomtown Rats singer was given an honorary knighted in 1986 in recognition of his charity work, including organising the 1985 Live Aid concert to help those suffering from starvation and disease in Ethiopia.

Other foreign recipients of the Freedom of Dublin include John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Irish rockers U2, who had campaigned for Suu Kyi’s release while she was a political prisoner, also voiced disappointment and said her silence was “starting to look a lot like assent”.

“Who could have predicted that if more than 600,000 people were fleeing from a brutal army for fear of their lives, the woman who many of us believed would have the clearest and loudest voice on the crisis would go quiet,” the band said in a statement.

“For these atrocities against the Rohingya people to be happening on her watch blows our minds and breaks our hearts.”

The Myanmar military says it launched the crackdown in response to attacks by Rohingya militants.

Kemal Pervanic grew up in a Bosnian Muslim village surrounded by Serbs. “My schoolmates were just my schoolmates and my teachers were my teachers and that’s how it was until the early 1990s,” Pervanic told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at London’s Frontline Club. But in 1992 he was in a concentration camp being interrogated and tortured by his favourite teacher.

“If you are born in peace, and raised in peace, you take peace for granted,” Pervanic said. “If you speak to anyone out there right now, they’ll tell you that they’re crazy if you tell them that something like that may happen. But now after I lived through such events, I know that it can happen to anyone.”

It’s been over21years since the war inBosnia Herzegovinaended. Pervanic has become a writer and human rights activist. He believes that the process of reconciliation has hardly begun. “Reconciliation and peace building is going to take decades and many generations,” he said. “The process leading up to the war didn’t take long, five to seven years. So you destroy peace, you destroy a normal society so quickly. And it takes such a long time to rebuild it again.”

Now a British citizen, Pervanic splits his time between London and Bosnia. He fears that people in Western Europe don’t appreciate how fragile peace can be.

“We don’t think somebody will come take it away from us,” Pervanic says. “Because it can so easily be taken away from us we all have to become educators, and we all have to become involved in politics.”

A grave digger at work, finishing the final resting place for one of thousands of Bosniak men and boys slaughtered by nationalist Bosnian Serb forces in 1995.

It’s known as the Srebrenica massacre.

One hundred and twenty seven new graves are being added to the more than 6,300 already in this cemetery.

The massacre was Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two.

An abandoned cultural center is one site where the massacre took place. Bullet holes are still visible in the walls.

The victims’ bodies were scattered across the country to conceal what the U.N. declared an act of genocide.

Forensic anthropologist Dragana Vucetic of the International Commission on Missing Persons studies the remains of victims, hoping to identify them.

The burial has become an annual July ritual for Muslim Bosniaks, and has become a reminder of collective suffering.

The U.N. estimates that over a thousand bodies are still missing.

A leader of Germany’s opposition Greens who has Turkish roots has received death threats after he pushed for a resolution approved last week by the German parliament that declares the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces a genocide.

Turkey recalled its ambassador to Germany in protest against the resolution. Ankara accepts that large numbers of Christian Armenians were killed on Ottoman territory during World War One but denies the killings amounted to a genocide.

Cem Oezdemir, one of the initiators of the resolution, has received death threats via Twitter, Facebook and email – some of them from Germans with Turkish roots in Germany and others from Turks in Turkey, said Julia Jorch, a spokeswoman for the Greens.

She said Oezdemir often received insults from right-wing extremists and Turkish nationalists and sometimes death threats but the number of these had surged in the run-up to and after the resolution, which parliament approved last Thursday.

On Monday Oezdemir was defiant, saying: “Votes in the German parliament are not dependent on which authoritarian ruler they make happy and which they don’t.”

On Sunday Erdogan lashed out at the German parliament for passing the resolution and suggested that Germany was being hypocritical given its own history.

“Look Germany, I am saying this again; first you will be held accountable for the Holocaust, then you will be held accountable on how you killed and destroyed more than 100,000 Namibians in Namibia,” Erdogan said at the graduation ceremony of a university in Istanbul, according to comments published by the state-run Anadolu agency.

During Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich six million Jews were murdered and in the early 1900s, when Namibia was a German colony, Germans carried out a campaign of slaughter there among the Herero and Nama tribes.

“You are the last country who could conduct a parliamentary vote for Turkey on the so-called Armenian genocide. We have no issues, no problem in our history on this topic. Our history is not one of massacres. Our history is one of compassion and mercy and that is our difference,” Erdogan said.

Germany has long acknowledged its guilt for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities and began in 1952 to pay compensation to Israel. In 2012 Berlin said it would pay a lifelong monthly pension to Jews who spent time in concentration camps or ghettos or who survived the Nazi regime by living in hiding or under a false identity.

Germany is home to a large ethnic Turkish community and is also an important trade partner for Turkey.