The UN rights chief on Tuesday urged Bangladesh to halt plans to repatriate more than 2,200 Rohingya Muslims to Myanmar, amid reports of continued violations against the minority.

Bangladesh and Myanmar agreed Tuesday to start returning Rohingya refugees in November, less than a week after UN investigators warned that a genocide against the Muslim minority was still ongoing.

Australia on Tuesday slapped travel and financial sanctions on five top Myanmar military officers, accused of overseeing brutal violence against Rohingya Muslims by units under their command, following similar moves by the European Union and United States.

Myanmar : Jailed journalists

Several Myanmar news outlets and dozens of civil society groups denounced the jailing of two Reuters reporters for seven years under the Official Secrets Act, and said their conviction was an assault on the right to freedom of information.

A Myanmar judge on Monday found two Reuters journalists guilty of breaching a law on state secrets and sentenced them to seven years in prison, in a landmark case seen as a test of progress towards democracy in the Southeast Asian country.

Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi should have resigned as Myanmar's de facto leader over last year's brutal army campaign against the Rohingya, the outgoing UN human rights chief has told the BBC.

As many as 85 villages were flooded in Myanmar after a dam failed, unleashing waters that blocked a major highway and forced more than 63,000 people from their homes, a state-run newspaper said on Thursday.

Water from a breached dam flooded communities in central Myanmar on Wednesday and blocked part of a highway linking the main cities of Yangon, Mandalay and Naypyitaw.

Myanmar's military carried out mass killings and gang rapes of Muslim Rohingya with "genocidal intent", and the commander-in-chief and five generals should be prosecuted for the gravest crimes under international law, UN investigators said.

Thousands of Rohingya refugees staged protests for "justice" Saturday on the first anniversary of a Myanmar military crackdown that forced them to flee to camps in Bangladesh.

With a repatriation plan in tatters and funding evaporating for a million refugees with ever-growing needs, Rohingya Muslims who fled Myanmar to Bangladesh face a grim future one year after the latest eruption of a decades-old conflict.