Building the Foundation for Accountability in Burma
CJA’s work in Burma began in 2018, rooted in a recognition that ethnic and religious minority communities faced systematic violence and discrimination with little legal recourse. Women in these communities bore a particular burden, subject to sexual and gender-based violence, discriminatory laws, and near-total exclusion from the justice system.
Beginning in 2019, working with Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) and a consortium of women’s rights organizations and legal advocates from Burma, CJA worked to strengthen the capacity of civil society to defend religious and ethnic minority women’s rights. Working across Burma, CJA worked with women’s organizations to document violations, and to advocate for stronger legal protections and accountability.
CJA convened strategic workshops bringing together women’s rights civil society organizations to align advocacy efforts, share documentation, and develop joint strategies for law and policy reform. CJA also provided legal mentorship to Burmese lawyers working on cases involving ethnic and religious minority women and developed legal analyses of Burma’s discriminatory laws measured against international human rights standards, analyses that partners used in advocacy with parliamentarians.
When COVID-19 struck in early 2020, CJA and its partners adapted, shifting consultations, advocacy workshops, and legal training online. Then, on February 1, 2021, the Tatmadaw seized power in a coup. The work changed overnight. Domestic litigation became impossible. Partners who had been focused on legislative reform were forced to flee, relocate, or go underground, and immediately redirected their efforts toward documenting atrocities and supporting coup survivors. CJA prioritized partners’ urgent security needs, including coordinating digital security training, supporting emergency relocation costs, and helping partners safely transfer documentation out of the country. Partners who had spent years learning to document gender-based violence and apply international legal standards turned those skills toward the Tatmadaw’s campaign of mass atrocity..
CJA partnered with Burmese human rights defenders and civil society organizations to strengthen their capacity to document atrocity crimes committed since the coup, including conflict-related sexual violence, mass executions, torture, and attacks on ethnic and religious minority communities. Through workshops, mentorship, and hands-on investigative support, CJA worked closely with more than a dozen human rights defenders operating both inside Burma and in exile. This support includes:
- Training in survivor-centered, trauma-informed interviewing
- Guidance on investigation planning and evidence analysis
- Legal mentorship on applying international humanitarian and criminal law standards to documented cases
- Support for secure data storage and digital protection
Partners documented more than 150 individual cases of conflict-related violence and submitted more than 30 case files to the UN Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM). Partners also contributed submissions to universal jurisdiction cases and UN Special Rapporteurs, participated in briefings with U.S. government officials, and engaged in advocacy at the UN Human Rights Council.
Through a series of community led strategic convenings, CJA brought together approximately 13 civil society and community-based organizations from Burma collecting documentation or working on accountability for gross human rights violations. These convenings aligned documentation efforts, built collaborative and strategic networks, and connected human rights defenders from Burma with counterparts from Syria, Argentina, Cambodia, and the Philippines to draw on their experiences navigating long-term accountability processes.
CJA’s longstanding partnerships in Burma help ensure that documentation efforts are survivor-centered, credible, and sustainable, and that evidence collected remains available for future legal processes and to support ongoing advocacy.
