Following Power Confirmation Vote, UUSC Urges Biden Administration to Protect Rohingya

Media Contact:
Michael Givens
Associate Director of Strategic Communications
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
Phone: +1-857-540-0617
Email: mgivens@uusc.org

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The Senate has confirmed former UN Ambassador Samantha Power to be the next administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, a position that will, among other things, give her a key role in shaping the Biden administration’s foreign policy towards Burma’s persecuted Rohingya minority.

The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) welcomes this news as an opportunity for the Biden administration to do more to address the systematic human rights abuses of the Burmese military impacting the Rohingya people and other ethnic minorities.

“Samantha Power has devoted her professional life to building international support and pressure for justice and accountability for human rights abuses and genocide around the world, and we call on her to use her new role to push the Biden administration to abandon its current caution and publicly recognize Burma’s treatment of the Rohingya for what it is: genocide,” said Rev. Mary Katherine Morn, CEO and President of UUSC. “The U.S. has spent billions of dollars in Burma, only to see a coup erase the country’s faltering steps towards democracy. It’s time for a new approach with a focus on justice—and Samantha Power has the power, and the moral standing, to help bring this change about.”

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The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) is a human rights and solidarity organization founded as a rescue mission in 1940 during the Holocaust. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and with a membership of more than 35,000 supporters across the United States, UUSC’s programs focus on the issues of climate change, migrant justice, and crisis response. 

UUSC’s Burma program spans 25 years of donor support to Burmese- and ethnic minority-led human rights and humanitarian aid organizations.