Religious minority persecution in Myanmar

Religious demographics and overview of religious minority persecution

According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an agency established by the US Congress to monitor the right to freedom of religion or belief abroad, the majority of Myanmar’s population - 88% - are Buddhists, approximately 6% are Christians, and 4% Muslims.

The 2022 USCIRF report also notes that “there is a significant correlation between ethnicity and religion” in Myanmar.

As set out in Commons Library briefing Myanmar’s civil war, there are long-standing tensions between the military and civil society, and between the Bamar ethnic majority and the country’s ethnic minorities. Since it first seized power in 1962, Myanmar’s state military, the Tatmadaw, has been intermittently fighting ethnic armed groups based largely in the country’s border regions.

USCIRF’s latest annual report, published in 2025, looks at the events of 2024, and recommends that the US State Department designate Myanmar as a country of particular concern (PDF). The Commission said that “religious freedom conditions in Burma continued to worsen amid the country’s ongoing civil war”.

The report details the displacement of religious minorities, particularly the Muslim-majority Rohingya people, and those in the Christian-majority Chin State, as well as instances of attacks on places of worship and clerics:

The Tatmadaw prohibited critical aid from reaching displaced people in many ethnic enclaves, and its forces targeted and destroyed religious sites throughout the year with airstrikes, shelling, and arson—killing more than 100 religious clergy and civilians sheltering in these places of worship. It continued to deliberately assault religious communities across the war-ridden nation to instil fear and retaliate against any potential resistance.

Persecution of Muslims including the Rohingya

Amnesty International in a 2017 report stated that “for decades, Rohingya in Rakhine State (on the western coast of Myanmar) have faced discrimination and racially-based restrictions in law, policy and practice”.

At the end of 2016, the military had begun major security operations in Rakhine state, home to most of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims, reportedly in response to an attack by a Rohingya armed group on border posts, in which nine police officers were killed. The violence escalated in August 2017, with many civilians affected, in what Human Rights Watch described as “a sweeping campaign of massacres, rape, and arson in northern Rakhine State” by the military, leading to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fleeing into neighbouring Bangladesh.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is currently hearing a case against Myanmar brought by Gambia in 2019, which alleges the actions against the Rohingya breached the international Genocide Convention. Aung San Suu Kyi, then Myanmar’s civilian leader (later removed in the 2021 military coup), defended Myanmar against the charges at the ICJ. She said the military may have used “disproportionate force” and if soldiers had committed war crimes they would be prosecuted. She said the military’s use of force did not prove it was trying to wipe out the Rohingya.

As of 30 November 2025, there are around 1.2 million Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh.

The Rohingya remaining in Myanmar include about 630,000 in Rakhine State. According to Human Rights Watch, they are “subject to systematic abuses that amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid, persecution, and deprivation of liberty, including about 150,000 held in open-air detention camps”.

USCIRF published a press release in October 2025 calling on the US Government to extend the Temporary Protected Status (a temporary legal protection) for Burmese people. The press release detailed that in the last year “the Burmese military and pro-junta militia attacked a Muslim village in Sagaing Region, burning down 400 homes and two mosques”.

Persecution of Christians

Open Doors, an NGO which highlights global persecution of Christians, in its 2025 World Watch Ranking report, says that “since the military coup in February 2021, Christians have encountered greater violence and tighter restrictions. Believers have been killed and churches have been indiscriminately attacked”. This includes “those in predominantly Christian states such as Chin, Kayah and Kachin, and in areas with significant Christian minorities, such as Sagaing Division, Yangon”.

In a December 2024 report on Myanmar (PDF) Open Doors states that: “even well-established churches belonging to historical Christian communities are being attacked”; and “more Christians than ever have been driven out to live in IDP [internally displaced people] camps, take refuge in churches or even flee to the jungle where they are often deprived of access to food and healthcare”.

The October 2025 USCRIF press release mentioned above also said that in the last year “in Chin State the army bombed three churches killing six civilians, including a pastor”.