More than five years ago, ASEAN promised the people of Myanmar a plan. It had five points: an end to violence, dialogue among all parties, a special envoy, humanitarian aid and an envoy’s visit. Min Aung Hlaing sat at the table in Jakarta and agreed. Then he went home and ignored it.
The killing continues. The dialogue never began. The aid is blocked or stolen. According to the latest UN human rights report, junta forces killed at least 1,241 civilians in the past year alone, and at least 8,075 since the coup. The Five-Point Consensus failed because it asked a man accused of atrocity crimes to police himself.
Yesterday, a different idea was tested in an Appeals Court in Manila, which has formally registered the survivors’ case.
Three years ago, in October 2023, five survivors from Chin State filed a criminal complaint at the Philippine Department of Justice. They accuse ten junta members, Min Aung Hlaing among them, of war crimes: murdering civilians, mutilating bodies, burning homes, destroying churches and using aid as a weapon. The Department of Justice refused to act. One complainant is the daughter of Pu Ral Tu, a Baptist elder shot dead as he carried medicine to Thantlang, a town the junta destroyed in a mass arson attack. Another is the uncle of Pastor Cung Biak Hum, killed trying to put out the fires; his body was then mutilated. Last month marked five years since Thantlang burned. The wounds remain unhealed.
Three years on, they are still waiting. That is not a legal difficulty. It is a failure of political will.
Their lawyers, Romel Bagares and Gilbert Andres, took that refusal to the Court of Appeals, and the Court has now stamped a docket number on the case. The law is clear. Article 17 of the Philippines’ International Humanitarian Law Act obliges its authorities to prosecute war crimes wherever they are committed, once properly brought to their attention. It does not matter that the victims are not Filipino, or that the crimes happened in Chin State. It is exactly the article invoked against former president Rodrigo Duterte, handed over to the International Criminal Court and now facing justice in The Hague. Andres, who also represents victims in the Duterte case, is invoking it against Min Aung Hlaing. As Bagares puts it, this is “an opportunity for the Philippines justice system to embrace universal jurisdiction for serious violations of international law.” If the law applies to Duterte, it applies to a foreign general whose troops commit atrocity crimes on an industrial scale. Anything else is a double standard.
Universal jurisdiction is not an abstraction. Some crimes are so grave that no border can shelter those who commit them. For survivors in Myanmar, it is the only door not yet slammed shut.
Meanwhile, ASEAN’s engagement with Min Aung Hlaing has a price, and the region is paying it.
Look at the scam centres. Industrial fraud compounds in Myanmar’s border areas hold tens of thousands of people, many trafficked from across Asia and beyond, forced to cheat strangers worldwide. They flourish where the junta and its allied militias profit from lawlessness. Their victims come from your country; their money moves through your banks.
Look at the drugs. Myanmar is the world’s largest opium producer, and its synthetic drugs flood Southeast Asia. Look at the refugees. The Rohingya, driven out in their hundreds of thousands in 2017, still languish in Bangladesh. Tens of thousands of Chin have fled to India. Every offensive pushes more people over a border.
Engagement does not tame a criminal state. It lets it grow. Every handshake tells the generals that atrocity carries no cost, and that a seat at the region’s top table is theirs to keep. Impunity is a profitable business model, and ASEAN is underwriting it.
The alternative is not isolation. It is accountability. Sanctions and statements have had their day, and so has patient diplomacy with the architects of the violence. The missing question is simple: how are those responsible to be brought to justice?
The courts of ASEAN’s own member states can begin to answer. Cases are advancing in Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Further afield, the generals are being held to account in Turkey, Denmark and Argentina; and they face justice in the two courts in the Hague, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. With the registration at the Court of Appeals in Manila, the Philippines joins them. The evidence gathered by the UN’s Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar is ready to use. A prosecutor in Manila can open an investigation tomorrow.
To the Philippine authorities we say: you have the law. You have the evidence. You have survivors who trusted your justice system with the worst moments of their lives. Act swiftly. They are fellow Christians. Their priests are being killed; their schools, churches and hospitals bombed from the skies. Hear their prayers. Have mercy.
To ASEAN: stop waiting for the generals to keep their word. They never will. Back the courts. Support the survivors. Treat Min Aung Hlaing not as an interlocutor but as a suspect.
The people of Myanmar do not want aid dependency or endless dialogue with their killers. They want their full political rights, including justice.
Five points failed. More time brings more failure. What is needed is justice.
