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ven though Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi plans to be absent from this week’s ASEAN Summit in Singapore, the meeting is still a good opportunity for ASEAN leaders to get acquainted with the country’s newly inaugurated president, Indonesia’s top diplomat says.

“Our information says that Myanmar will be represented by its new president, Win Myint,” Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said on Tuesday. “I think it [ASEAN Summit] will be a good chance for them to introduce him and, hence, other ASEAN leaders will get to know him better.”

The 66-year-old Myint assumed the presidency last month after his predecessor, 71-year-old Htin Kyaw, stepped down.

Suu Kyi, through her government spokesperson Zaw Htay, without giving a reason, confirmed she would not attend the summit, which runs from Wednesday to Saturday.

Suu Kyi has been facing increasing pressure from the global community about the Rohingya crisis. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate is accused of failing to do enough to halt the persecution of the minority Muslim people forced out of Rakhine state by the Myanmar military. Since a Myanmar army operation started in August, nearly 700,000 Rohingya have been driven to crowded refugee camps in Bangladesh, to which after saying for months “it was not the right time”, Myanmar has finally given a green light for a visit by representatives of the United Nations Security Council.

The Rohingya people have a “strong desire” to leave the camps and go back home, according to Cornelius Hanung, who just returned from a fact-finding mission to Cox’s Bazar for the Bangkok-based Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development.

“They also want to be included in any decisions and agreements made by the Bangladeshi government and Myanmar’s government regarding repatriation,” he said on Tuesday. He said he regretted that ASEAN, especially Indonesia, which had a strong bargaining position, only managed to give humanitarian assistance but put no effort into opening discussions with other countries.

“When I was there [Cox’s Bazar] they called me brother when they learned I’m from Indonesia,” he said. “They asked me, where have you been?”

He said it was already urgent for ASEAN leaders to start doing something as various organization had documented many human right violations, and more would likely occur as long as humanitarian assistance to the 700,000 refugees was limited.

“The toilets are starting to not work, the water is contaminated and there’s a growing concern by the Bangladeshi about the environmental impact of clearing a forest for the camp, especially now the monsoon season is coming. There’ll be floods everywhere,” he said. “Human lives are in danger if we don’t have solutions.” He also questioned whether Indonesia’s non-interference principle was still relevant considering the major human rights violations happening nearby.

“If I may cite the ASEAN Charter and the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration that upholds peace, this case is clearly a violation of those,” he said.

Masha Lisitsyna, the senior managing legal officer for the New York-based Open Society Foundations, said that in addition to normal diplomatic exchanges, there were, theoretically, ways for one country to prosecute the guilty in another country.

According to the UN Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), the practice is universally prohibited, so according to international law, she said, any country could theoretically open a criminal investigation into alleged torture in a different country.

“It does not, in theory, have to be committed by the national [state] of the country where the case is opened,” she said, adding that from a theoretical perspective, an international treaty means all countries agreed to respect the agreement and it was possible for a country to have legal grounds to raise certain issues.