"United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres should act to prevent future UN failures in the face of atrocities, a coalition of 16 organizations said in a joint letter to the secretary-general that was released today. The May 2019 report of an independent investigation by a Guatemalan diplomat, Gert Rosenthal, raised serious concerns about the UN’s handling of the human rights crisis in Myanmar. The secretary-general should promptly carry out reforms to prevent what the report called the recurrence of the “systematic” failures and “obvious dysfunctional performance” and to ensure individual accountability for those failures. “The UN leadership promised it would never again turn a blind eye to atrocities after ignoring massive civilian deaths in Sri Lanka a decade ago, but it happened again,” said Louis Charbonneau, UN director at Human Rights Watch. “The UN leadership needs to avoid another catastrophe, including by holding officials who failed to act during Myanmar’s ethnic cleaning campaign accountable.”..."