Staff Reporter :
The International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest court, will deliver a decision in a genocide case filed against Myanmar on January 23, the Gambian Ministry of Justice said on Twitter on Monday.
Gambia filed a case on November 11 at ICJ accusing Myanmar of genocide in its campaign against its Rohingya Muslim minority.
Gambia has accused Myanmar of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention in a military campaign that expelled more than 730,000 Rohingya from the country.
Gambia, which filed the case on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), requested the ICJ to urgently order measures “to stop Myanmar’s genocidal conduct immediately”. Myanmar’s military launched a brutal campaign against the Rohingyas in August 2017 in the pretext of a counterinsurgency response.
An estimated 745,000 Rohingyas were forced to flee to Bangladesh since then, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
State-sponsored discrimination against the Rohingyas stretch back decades. Myanmar has denied them citizenship despite having lived in the country for generations and forced many Rohingyas to live in squalid camps in apartheid-like condition.
Bangladesh is currently hosting over 1.1 million Rohingyas.
The head of a UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar warned last month that, “There is a serious risk of genocide recurring”.
The mission said also in its final report in September that Myanmar should be held responsible in international legal forums for alleged genocide against the Rohingya.
