As of 2026-06. UNHCR's Bangladesh operation reports close to one million Rohingya refugees as of 30 June 2026, a figure that has risen with new arrivals since 2024 as fighting in Rakhine State intensified.
Bangladesh is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and treats the Rohingya as "forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals" rather than refugees, confining them to camps in Cox's Bazar under a policy that bars formal employment, restricts access to Bangla-language and accredited education, and requires permission to leave the camp area. From 2019 the authorities erected barbed-wire perimeter fencing around the camps and installed watchtowers and checkpoints, which the government described as a security and anti-trafficking measure and which humanitarian organisations said impeded movement and cost lives during fires and floods. From December 2020 the government relocated refugees to Bhasan Char, a low-lying island roughly 60 km offshore developed to decongest the camps; some 34,500 people were living there as of December 2025, and movement between the island and the mainland requires official permission through a process that Fortify Rights in January 2026 described as opaque and arbitrary. Bangladesh states that all relocations were voluntary and that the island offers better living conditions than the congested mainland camps; Fortify Rights and other groups documented misleading inducements and threats and characterise the arrangement as de facto arbitrary detention. As of 2026 there has been no verified voluntary repatriation to Myanmar, funding shortfalls have cut rations and services, and the population continues to grow through new arrivals and births.
Bangladeshi authorities holding Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in fenced camps under an encampment policy that grants no formal refugee status and no right to work
Myanmar's 2014 census excluded people identifying as Rohingya and the government published an estimate of about 1,090,000 non-enumerated residents in Rakhine State. Bangladesh had already been hosting some 200,000-300,000 Rohingya from earlier expulsions before the 2017 influx of roughly 750,000.
Both fields are null because the encampment policy itself has no aggregate death toll. Deaths occur from camp fires, landslides — Human Rights Watch reported fatal landslides in July 2026 — armed-group violence inside the camps, and sea crossings by those attempting to leave, but no body aggregates these as a toll of confinement, and the mass killing that produced this refugee population is counted under Myanmar's 2016-17 clearance operations.
Human Rights Watch documents that over a million Rohingya are held in camps under unsafe conditions with violence by armed groups and security forces, behind barbed-wire fencing and movement restrictions, with some relocated to the isolated island of Bhasan Char under conditions refugees describe as confinement.
Bangladesh