A landmark case accusing Myanmar of committing genocide against minority Muslim Rohingya opened at the United Nations’ top court on Monday.
The predominantly Muslim West African country of Gambia filed the case at the ICJ – also known as the World Court – in 2019, accusing Myanmar of committing genocide against the Rohingya, a mainly Muslim minority in the remote western Rakhine state.
Myanmar’s armed forces launched an offensive in 2017 that forced at least 730,000 Rohingya from their homes and into neighbouring Bangladesh, where they recounted killings, mass rape and arson.
A U.N. fact-finding mission concluded the 2017 military offensive had included “genocidal acts”.
This is the first genocide case the International Court of Justice will hear in full in more than a decade. The outcome will have repercussions beyond Myanmar, likely affecting South Africa’s genocide case at the ICJ against “Israel” over the war in Gaza.
“The case is likely to set critical precedents for how genocide is defined and how it can be proven, and how violations can be remedied,” Nicholas Koumjian, head of the U.N.’s Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, told the Reuters news agency.
