Asia-Pacific

[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)...

[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;...

[Priya Pillai is an international lawyer, head of the Asia Justice Coalition secretariat, and a contributing editor at Opinio Juris.] It has been three years since the forced exodus of the Rohingya from Myanmar was at its zenith, as a result of international crimes committed in Rakhine state. With close to a million individuals forced to flee to Bangladesh and other...

[Tarcisio Gazzini is Professor of international law at the University of East Anglia and visiting professor at the University of Trento and the Geneva Academy of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.] The 2015 Indian Model Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) (hereinafter “Model”) contains a number of important provisions addressing the main concerns raised about investment law and may be expected not only to serve in the negotiations of BITs...

The Gambia initiated legal proceedings in the United States a few months ago against Facebook, in order to compel the company to hand over information related to its ongoing case against Myanmar, relating to the Rohingya, before the International Court of Justice.  This legal strategy is in accordance with a provision of U.S. law - §1782 of the U.S. Code, a federal statute which permits the compelling of testimony,...

[Tasha Manoranjan, Esq. is the Executive Director of People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL) and a Senior Policy Advisor at the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The views expressed here are PEARL's and do not represent the Commission's. Meruba Sivaselvachandran is a rising second-year student in the JD/MBA program at University of Toronto and a Legal Intern at PEARL.] Introduction The...

[Srinivas Burra is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Legal Studies at South Asian University, New Delhi; Haris Jamil is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at University of Delhi, New Delhi.] On 15 June 2020, there was a violent face-off in the Galwan valley, in the western sector of the China-India border. Soldiers from China and India scuffled at the border, which led to...

[Aparajitha Narayanan currently works as a Legal Intern for the UNIRMCT and for Global Rights Compliance, The Hague. She holds an Adv. LL.M. in Public International Law from Leiden University (2019).] Introduction As a planet we are currently going through an unfortunate phase where the global order has taken a disruptive hit. Many believe that it is perhaps impossible to recover from this pandemic-created sinkhole, since COVID-19 has...

[Eva Buzo is an Australian lawyer, and the Executive Director of Victim Advocates International. She lived in Cox’s Bazar between November 2017 and September 2019.] David Eichert’s “Concerns about the non-inclusion of sexual violence against men and boys in the Gambia v Myanmar” raises important points in relation to the characterisation of sexual violence as being a primarily female experience in the clearance operations perpetrated by the Myanmar...