International Experts Find Crimes Against Humanity Targeting Muslims in India; IAMC Demands Sanctions

WASHINGTON, D.C. (April 8, 2026) — The Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) today expressed grave alarm at the findings of a landmark new report by the Panel of Independent International Experts (PIIE), which documents widespread and systematic human rights violations against Muslims in the Indian states of Assam and Uttar Pradesh. 

The report, published by the Transnational Legal Clinic at King’s College London, finds reasonable grounds to believe that international crimes, including persecution, torture, deportation, and apartheid as crimes against humanity, may have been committed against Muslim communities.

The Panel is composed of three distinguished international jurists: Sonja Biserko (Serbia), President of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights and former UN investigator on North Korea; Marzuki Darusman (Indonesia), former Attorney General of Indonesia and Chair of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar; and Stephen Rapp (USA), former Chief of Prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues.

In Assam, the Panel found that the systematic stripping of citizenship from Bengali-speaking Muslims, combined with mass expulsions, forced evictions, arbitrary detention, custodial deaths, and the institutionalized suppression of political and civil rights, amounts to apartheid as a crime against humanity. 

The Panel further found that repeated statements by Assam’s Chief Minister portraying Bengali-speaking Muslims as “infiltrators” and existential threats, made in circumstances that appear to be preparing the ground for ethnic cleansing, invoke the international community’s binding obligation to prevent genocide. The Panel called for urgent measures to hold the Chief Minister accountable and to halt such violence-inciting speech. The pattern of forced evictions and inflammatory rhetoric by state officials may also constitute persecution and deportation as crimes against humanity.

In Uttar Pradesh, the Panel documented widespread “half-encounter” maimings by police, mass demolitions of Muslim homes and businesses, discriminatory enforcement of anti-conversion and cow-protection laws, and the systematic targeting of Muslim protesters and civil society. These patterns, the Panel found, may amount to torture, persecution, and other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity.

The Panel further noted that in both states, the Chief Ministers, who also hold the position of Home Minister, bear personal responsibility for directing and supervising these violations, and that their rhetoric has served as a permissive signal for violence by non-state actors.

“This report by three of the world’s most respected international legal experts is an indictment of the Indian government’s systematic campaign to persecute, dehumanize, and strip the rights of its Muslim citizens,” said Mohammed Jawad, President, Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC)

“The findings of apartheid, persecution, torture, and crimes against humanity are not merely alarming, they demand an immediate international response. The United States government, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and democratic nations around the world can no longer remain silent in the face of such documented atrocities,” Jawad added.

IAMC calls on the U.S. government, Congress, and the UN to urgently act on the Panel’s recommendations, including mandating an independent UN investigation into India’s treatment of its Muslim minority and imposing targeted sanctions on those responsible for these crimes.

The US government should adopt the recommendations of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and designate India as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC). It should also impose sanctions on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and officials implicated in the persecution of religious minorities.

In particular, the U.S. government should announce targeted sanctions against Himanta Biswa Sarma, Yogi Adityanath, and Pushkar Singh Dhami for enabling large-scale hate and violence against Christian and Muslim minorities in their respective states.