Myanmar faces genocide lawsuit at top UN court

AFP, 11TH NOVEMBER, 2019

- Myanmar faced accusations of genocide in a lawsuit filed by Gambia at the UN’S top court on Monday over the southeast Asian nation’s treatment of Rohingya Muslims, Gambia’s government said.

Gambia said it was acting on behalf of the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in bringing the case against Myanmar before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

It accuses Myanmar of breaching the UN Genocide Convention through a bloody military campaign which has driven hundreds of thousands of people from the Rohingya minority into neighbouring Bangladesh.

In 2017 a brutal military crackdown forced 740,000 Rohingya to flee over the border into sprawling camps in Bangladesh in violence that UN investigators say amounts to “genocide”.

The lawsuit asks the ICJ to “order Myanmar to cease and desist from its genocidal acts, to punish the perpetrators, and to provide reparations for the Rohingya victims,” Gambia’s justice ministry said.

It said Myanmar had failed to meet its obligations to prevent and to punish genocide, accusing it of “wanton acts of violence and malicious degradation with the specific intent of state actors to destroy the Rohingya as a group”.

Mainly-muslim Gambia said it had “stepped up” to file the case on behalf of the rest of the OIC. Its justice minister Abubacarr Tambadou is a former genocide prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and has visited Rohingya camps in Bangladesh.

In 2017 a brutal military crackdown forced 740,000 Rohingya to flee over the border into sprawling camps in Bangladesh in violence that UN investigators say amounts to “genocide”.