Foreign Ministry Permanent Secretary Myint Thu said the offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.N. Development Program responded last week with a proposal and concept paper to the government's invitation for U.N. involvement, which the government is now studying. He did not give a timeline for the return, but simply said: “They can come back when it’s convenient for them.”

'I fear Myanmar, I don't want to go home': Rohingya in Bangladesh – in pictures Read more

This move towards repatriation will barely make a dent in the 700,000 Muslim Rohingya refugees currently living in camps in Bangladesh after fleeing a violent and targeted campaign by the Burmese military in Rakhine state which began in August 2017 and destroyed their homes and left thousands dead. The Myanmar government said the 374 repatriated refugees would be placed in the temporary housing camps they have built – which Human Rights Watch described as “open air prisons” – for no longer than a month and would then be allowed to return to either their original villages, or close by. Speaking to the council, Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said the military’s campaign against the Rohingya bore “the hallmarks of genocide” and urged international legal action against “the individuals who gave the orders and carried out violations against individuals and entire ethnic and religious groups.”

On Monday, Amnesty International accused the Myanmar government of destroying the remains of Rohingya villages in a campaign dedicated to “erasing evidence of crimes against humanity.” Using satellite imagery, Amnesty documented how new security bases were being built on land that had once housed Rohingya communities.
The government of Myanmar agrees to repatriate 374 Rohingya refugees from a list of 8,000 submitted by the government of Bangladesh. Myanmar's authorities blamed their Bangladeshi counterparts for the slow process, citing "incomplete" information for many of the refugees on the list.