Asylum Access Malaysia (AAM) has noted the Prime Minister’s statement that Myanmar has agreed to take back 5,000 Rohingya refugees currently in Malaysia.
We recognise the government’s stated intent to manage a difficult and increasingly strained situation, and we do not dispute that Malaysia has hosted one of the region’s largest Rohingya populations for decades without adequate international responsibility-sharing.
The UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar found that Rohingya have endured decades of institutionalised persecution, and that the 2017 military ‘clearance operations’ amounted to killings, mass rape and torture carried out with genocidal intent.
These events remain the subject matter of an active case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) relating to possible violations of the Genocide Convention by the government of Myanmar; notably, a case Malaysia itself supports. Provisional measures ordered by the ICJ in 2020 have not been implemented.
In 2025, the Myanmar team of the UN human rights office reported that the Rohingya people continue to live in the most precarious protection environment, subjected to systematic and widespread human rights abuses by both the military and the Arakan Army.
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Patterns of abuses documented throughout 2025 include “arbitrary arrest and detention, enforced disappearances, forced recruitment, forced labour, extortion, taxation, confiscation of Rohingya homes and lands, and restrictions on freedom of movement, communications and livelihood activities”
Conditions have not improved since. Renewed fighting in Rakhine state between the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army has driven fresh atrocities and displacement.
In September 2025, the UN human rights chief told a high-level conference on Myanmar that current displacement patterns in northern Rakhine are themselves the clearest evidence that safe, sustainable, dignified and voluntary returns are not currently possible.
Any agreement to return the Rohingya to Myanmar exposes them to irreparable harm and risk to their safety and lives, and violates the customary international law principle of non-refoulement – the prohibition on returning individuals to a country where they face persecution. This is a principle Malaysia is bound by even though it is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention.
This announcement comes against the backdrop of rising hostility towards refugee communities in Malaysia over recent months, including the eviction of over 100 Rohingya refugees in Penang and the detention, however brief, of refugees who gathered peacefully outside the UN refugee agency’s office to seek help. We urge that this context not be allowed to shape decisions about people’s safety and futures.
While recognising that this is a difficult, long-standing situation, AAM asserts that people who have fled unimaginable violence require legal protection and the opportunity to rebuild their lives with safety and dignity.
We remain ready to work with the government, civil society and refugee communities towards an approach that reflects that principle. – AAM, 31 July
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