As Rohingya Crisis Enters Its Ninth Year, Justice For All Calls on New UNGA President Khalilur Rahman to Prioritize Education, Accountability, and Self-Reliance

June 5, 2026

Following the election of Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister H.E. Khalilur Rahman as President of the 81st U.N. General Assembly, Justice For All calls on the incoming President to leverage his Rohingya experience to alter the international community’s failing response. With 1.2 million refugees facing funding cuts and a third generation without schooling, President-elect Rahman must act decisively. He is uniquely positioned to break the “strategic limbo” trapping three generations of Rohingya in statelessness. His Assembly theme, “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation,” will ring hollow if it does not deliver for the world’s most persecuted minority. Trust cannot be restored while 500,000 children lack classrooms and families survive on rations smaller than a daily cup of coffee.

Bangladesh’s Burden

Justice For All acknowledges that Bangladesh has hosted over 1.2 million Rohingya refugees for nearly a decade, absorbing significant economic and environmental strain. What began as a humanitarian emergency in August 2017, when approximately 750,000 Rohingya fled genocide in Burma, has become a protracted displacement crisis with no end in sight. Bangladesh, one of the world’s most densely populated nations, has borne this burden with limited international support. The refugee population now represents nearly one percent of Bangladesh’s total population, concentrated in the Cox’s Bazar district where host communities have seen their land, forests and livelihoods placed under immense pressure. President-elect Rahman, having served as Bangladesh’s High Representative on the Rohingya issue, knows intimately the challenges his nation faces, from camp management and security to the diplomatic struggle for repatriation. His election provides an opportunity for the international community to finally match Dhaka’s hosting efforts with concrete action, something that has been promised but rarely delivered since 2017.

A Crisis of Education and Survival

There is a $710.5 million funding gap for the 2026 Joint Response Plan, 26 percent lower than last year.  World Food Program (WFP) rations have been cut to as low as $7 per person.The WFP’s tiered system assumes refugees can supplement meals despite being legally prohibited from employment. Over 500,000 Rohingya children have never attended proper school, a crisis disproportionately impacting girls. UNICEF’s 6,400 learning centers have largely closed after U.S. funding ended. Addressing this crisis requires expanding and funding Rohingya-run schools alongside new infrastructure. Justice For All’s Burma Task Force is building online education hubs (electricity, internet, computers) under an existing Bangladesh MOU, but U.N. political support is urgently needed to fund these and other life-sustaining critical projects.

Justice For All thanks Finland for its €2 million pledge and acknowledges other contributing nations, but the international response remains catastrophically underfunded. Vulnerable groups, especially women, children and the elderly, including 150,000 new arrivals since early 2024, face heightened risks daily.

Conflict Inside Myanmar and Shifting U.S. Policy

Inside Burma, the military junta continues to weaponize starvation and conduct airstrikes against civilians as part of its ongoing genocide. Renewed violence in Arakan/Rakhine State, including Arakan Army atrocities against Rohingya civilians, has driven 150,000 additional refugees into Bangladesh. Justice For All’s Burma Task Force condemns all parties that target Rohingya and other ethnic civilian communities throughout Burma.

Grave concern surrounds apparent shifting U.S. foreign policy. Reports that suggest Washington is considering engagement with the junta for access to rare earth minerals would abandon the Rohingya to their tormentors. The United States has been the largest donor to the Rohingya response since 2017; that moral leadership cannot be traded for mining concessions.

Regional Failure

ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus has failed after five years. Rather than isolating the junta and effectively engaging with the National Unity Government, member states have de facto legitimized mass murderers. Justice For All further condemns regional pushbacks and deportations of Rohingya asylum seekers, with several governments forcibly returning refugees to Myanmar or abandoning them at sea, a flagrant violation of non-refoulement.

Call to Action

Justice For All calls on President-elect Rahman to pursue six urgent actions:

1. Instruct the U.N. Security Council to surge funding for humanitarian relief through border-based mechanisms that bypass the Burma military junta, channeling aid directly to trusted local Rohingya and other persecuted ethnic-led organizations.
2. Push for the establishment of safe corridors inside Burma for aid delivery to ensure food, medicine and shelter reach vulnerable populations without being weaponized by the junta.
3. Pressure member states and regional associations to secure immediate funding for camp operations and food aid in Bangladesh, reversing the ration cuts that have left individuals surviving on $7 per month.
4. Work with Bangladesh to lift camp employment restrictions, allowing Rohingya refugees controlled access to income-generating activities. Current restrictions have created an unsustainable 98 percent aid dependency. Permitting vocational training, cash-for-work programs and remote online work would enable self-reliance while incentivizing donor nations to increase pledges, knowing their aid will be used more sustainably.
5. Convene an emergency UNGA session on the Rohingya crisis, with a specific focus on the education crisis, during the Fall UNGA meetings.
6. Demand the U.N. Security Council refer the situation to the International Criminal Court for prosecution of genocide commanders while maintaining and expanding targeted sanctions on the junta and its fuel and arms suppliers.

The genocide continues today through ongoing atrocities by the military junta and Arakan Army in Arakan/Rakhine state, the worsening malnutrition and starvation in the camps in Cox Bazaar, drownings in the Andaman Sea and a world that looks away. President-elect Rahman has the experience and mandate to change that. The question is whether the General Assembly will finally act.