The contributions in the symposium this past week have brought up multiple issues and perspectives, pointing to challenges in the quest for justice and accountability for the Rohingya, and the role of international law. Rather than go over what has been highlighted already, here are a few reflections, linked to the international legal developments and the wider context. There is little...
[Laetitia van den Assum is a diplomatic expert who has served as Netherlands ambassador on four continents. She was also a member of the Rakhine Advisory Commission, chaired by the late Kofi Annan.] Myanmar’s reluctance to embrace its rich ethnic, religious and cultural diversity remains the biggest stumbling block towards peace, stability and development. It stands in the way of other major challenges, particularly high inequality and an...
[Param-Preet Singh is associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch.] Three years ago, my organization reported on the brutal campaign of Myanmar’s military, also known as the Tatmadaw, as it committed countless atrocities and forced more than 740,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh. In September 2018, the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission urged the investigation of the Tatmadaw’s generals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and...
[Simon Adams is the Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.] “We believe that mass killings and ethnic cleansing are underway across Rakhine State, and that there may be genocidal intent on behalf of the authorities.” That was my concluding comment at an informal briefing for members of the UN Security Council on the morning of 8 September 2017. The meeting took place...
[Akila Radhakrishnan (@akilaGJC) is the President of the Global Justice Center, where she directs GJC’s work to establish legal precedents protecting human rights and ensuring gender equality.] This August marks not only the 3rd anniversary of the start of the Rohingya genocide, but also the 6th anniversary of the start of the Yazidi genocide. Beyond starting in the same month, these...
[Shannon Raj Singh is a member of Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers and a Visiting Fellow of Practice at the Oxford Programme on International Peace and Security.] The seat of the International Criminal Court, in the rain-soaked Hague, is located approximately 8,000 kilometers from Cox’s Bazar, as the crow flies. For many Rohingya victims of atrocities located in the refugee camps there, that distance is simply...
[Antonia Mulvey is the Executive Director of Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) and former investigator to the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar.] On 10 December 2019, Human Rights Day, I was sitting in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, listening to Counsel for The Gambia quote an interview I had conducted with a Rohingya woman who had been beaten, stripped naked, tied...
[John Heieck is the Deputy Managing Editor of Opinio Juris and an independent researcher and scholar of international criminal law.] Introduction The focus of this post is the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (The Gambia v. Myanmar) (hereinafter Rohingya Genocide case), and specifically, the importance of the ICJ’s Provisional Measures Order (PMO) of 23 January 2020. I examine the...
[Kingsley Abbott (@AbbottKingsley) is the Coordinator of the International Commission of Jurists’ Global Accountability Initiative. Michael A Becker is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin. Bruno Gelinas-Faucher is a PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Université de Montréal.] Rohingya all over the world are following closely the International Court of Justice (ICJ)...
[Melanie O'Brien is Senior Lecturer in International Law at the University of Western Australia, and Second Vice-President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.] As part of the Opinio Juris symposium, “The impact and implications of International law: Myanmar and the Rohingya”, this post looks at the potential impact and implications of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal...
[Jenny Domino is a legal adviser of the International Commission of Jurists, Asia-Pacific Program. (@jenny_domino). Photo credit: Jenny Domino, Maha Bandoola Park.] Three years since the 2017 military “clearance operations” in Rakhine state drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to neighboring Bangladesh, various legal pathways have opened up in the field of international law to seek justice for the persecuted ethnic minority. Robust interpretations of...
[Kingsley Abbott (@AbbottKingsley) is the Coordinator of the International Commission of Jurists’ Global Accountability Initiative.] Whenever I meet policymakers to discuss accountability for the well-documented and widespread serious human rights violations in Myanmar, I get engaged in some version of the ‘peace vs justice’ debate: that since Myanmar has only recently emerged from a long period of military rule, perhaps we shouldn’t press too hard for accountability;...