Refugee Artwork Enters the World's Courtrooms as Evidence

By Daniel Okafor

Enayet Khan fled Myanmar on foot in 2017, and his paintings of what he saw are now being used as evidence in international genocide proceedings. Ten family members fled with him. Three were injured on the way.

For three days, Khan moved through forests and fields, slipping from village to village as fires closed in behind. The safety never lasted; by morning, each village burned too. Soldiers moved fast. Khan watched people shot in front of him. His own home was already ash.

"I lost everything," Khan told Hyperallergic by phone. "Home, documentation, property, a sense of security."

From camp sketches to a legal record

Khan settled in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, now home to nearly one million Rohingya refugees. The Rohingya have endured decades of discrimination under Myanmar's successive governments. A 1982 law stripped them of citizenship, leaving them one of the largest stateless groups in the world. Most fled in 2017 to escape the military's crimes against humanity and genocide.

In the camps, Khan began painting and drawing to process the atrocities: burning homes, fleeing families, executions. He then trained other refugees to do the same, founding the Rohingya Art Club (RAC), which promotes visual storytelling as both expression and resistance.

His canvases depict exactly what he witnessed — the burnings, the flight, the summary executions carried out by Myanmar's military. Think courtroom exhibit, not gallery wall.

Why courts are paying attention

The legal context is scaling up fast. A record 117.8 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide, a figure that has risen for 12 consecutive years, according to UNHCR data. Investigations and prosecutions of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes surged within the European Union, with new cases up 44% between 2016 and 2021, per Eurojust. The International Criminal Court (ICC, the tribunal for war crimes and genocide) has itself called the growing demand for accountability "unprecedented."

Legal advocates see art as one way to meet that demand. Legal experts say refugee artwork can help convey testimony, corroborate survivor accounts, and even enter legal proceedings as evidence of mass atrocities.

Antonia Mulvey, executive director of Legal Action Worldwide and a former United Nations investigator, has put that principle to work. She collected artwork as part of the evidence in a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ, the UN's top court) charging the Myanmar military with genocide against Rohingya communities in 2017.

Her reasoning is practical. The illiteracy rate among Rohingya people, especially women and children, makes traditional written statements difficult to record. In those contexts, Mulvey noted, drawings became a vital way to convey testimony — a survivor's account rendered in paint where a sworn affidavit can't reach.

What this means for accountability

Khan's story sits at the intersection of two trends: more displaced people seeking justice, and courts needing evidence that survives language barriers and lost documentation. His paintings — and those of the refugees he trained — now do double duty as testimony and as art. The ICJ case continues, and the evidence files include images made by people who watched the crimes happen.