Genocide Emergency: Rohingya in Maungdaw, Myanmar

Genocide Watch
26 December 2024  

Imagery verified by CNN shows the aftermath of an attack on the western edge of Maungdaw township’s Myo Ma ward.

GENOCIDE EMERGENCY:
MAUNGDAW, RAKHINE STATE, MYANMAR
DECEMBER 2024

Gambia hailed for defending Rohingya people

THE POINT
Momodou Jawo
May 6, 2024, 

The 57 Member states of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) have and appreciated the pioneering role played by The Gambia in defending the Rohingya at the level of the International Court of Justice.

“The Summit also reaffirmed the OIC’s support for the right of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to self-determination, as well as the special attention the OIC attaches to Muslim communities and minorities in Member States, especially to the issue of the Rohingya Muslim community,” the OIC Secretary General Hissein Brahim Taha said during his closing remark of the 15th OIC Summit in Banjul on Sunday.

Myanmar is on notice: killings must end now

THE NATIONAL NEWS
N OPINION

The International Court of Justice has ordered Naypyidaw to preserve evidence and prevent further atrocities

President of the International Court of Justice, Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf (4-R), ruled in the lawsuit filed by The Gambia against Myanmar, during a court session in The Hague, The Netherlands, 23 January 2020. That country is accused of genocide because of the persecution of a Muslim minority in the country. Robin Van Lonkhuijsen / EPA 

Gambia is a nation of just two million people, covering an area of around 10,000 square kilometres sandwiched between Senegal and the Atlantic Ocean. Yet since last year, the West African country has been on a grand mission to put an end to crimes dating back to 2017, allegedly committed by the government of Myanmar, a nation of more than 53 million people, against the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority in Rakhine, one of Myanmar’s constituent states.

In defence of Aung San Suu Kyi

theinterpretor
Derek Tonkin
Published 22 Feb 2024 

Many in Myanmar have condemned what they perceive asseriously flawed Western criticism of the Burmese ex-leader. 

On 18 October 2023, the Brighton and Hove City Council in the United Kingdom revoked the Freedom of the City awarded to Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi in 2011. Their special meeting lasted only 18 minutes, with Councillor Bella Sankey, the Labour leader of the Council, stating that it was not right to honour a person who “presided over the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Muslim Rohingya community” and was “an enabler to racial and religious discrimination and ethnic cleansing”. Sankey was supported by all 50 or so of the Council members present.

Myanmar Junta Media Smear Gambia as Impoverished Sex Tourism Hotspot

The Irrawaddy
November 9, 2023

A man walks on a beach in the popular tourist area of Senegambia in Banjul, the capital of the Gambia. / AFP

Myanmar’s military regime has used its propaganda newspapers to smear the Gambia as a historical land of slaves-turned-impoverished sex tourism hub, as the West African nation continues its Rohingya genocide trial at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

A Bleak Future Awaits, But There’s Still Hope!

BORDER CRIMINOLOGIES
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Author(s) Arafat Reza,
Manzoor Hasan OBE
Posted :7 June 2023

Guest post by Manzoor Hasan OBE and Arafat Reza. Manzoor Hasan OBE is currently serving as the Executive Director of the Centre for Peace and Justice, BRAC University. He can be reached at manzoor.h@bracu.ac.bd. Arafat Reza is working as a Research Associate at the Centre for Peace and Justice, BRAC University. He can be reached at arafat.reza@bracu.ac.bd.

Credit: CPJ Volunteer.

We want to take you back to 2017. Ayesha Begum was twenty years old and the mother of a one-year-old boy at the time. She was having dinner with her sisters-in-law when Myanmar army forces stormed into their home and pushed the women into a room. For the next few hours, Ayesha and her sisters were raped in turns by twelve soldiers. Later when the opportunity arose, they walked for eight days and fled to neighbouring Bangladesh. Two of Ayesha’s sisters-in-law did not survive the tempestuous journey.

Fifth anniversary of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar: UK statement

Press release

The UK announces new sanctions and legal action in support of Myanmar’s Rohingya community.

Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and The Rt Hon Amanda Milling MPPublished25 August 2022

Minister for Asia Amanda Milling

• UK takes fresh action against the Myanmar Armed Forces on 5th anniversary of the military’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya
• new sanctions against military-linked companies to target the military’s access to arms and revenue
• UK confirms its intention to intervene in The Gambia v. Myanmar International Court of Justice Case to support international justice efforts

ICJ’s fresh hearings into Rohingya case bring fresh hope

The Daily Star
Wednesday, February 23, 2022

The world must come together for the Rohingya cause

File photo of a court proceeding in a case filed by the Gambia against Myanmar over allegations of genocide against the Rohingya at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Netherlands, on January 23, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Eva Plevier

We welcome the International Court of Justice's initiative to start a fresh round of hearings into the Rohingya genocide case filed by the Gambia over two years ago. The hearings will be held in two rounds starting from today. The Gambia, on behalf of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), filed the case in November 2019 with an aim to bring Myanmar to account for its genocidal actions against the Rohingya. The court, after holding a preliminary hearing, found the claims to be substantial and ordered Myanmar to take provisional measures to prevent further acts of genocide in the Rakhine State. Two years have passed since then, but Myanmar has not taken any such measures yet. It has not taken any initiative to grant citizenship or ensure other basic rights of the Rohingya.

ICJ begins oral arguments in Myanmar genocide case

JURIST
Pooja Mehta | Gujarat National Law U., IN
February 22, 2022 09:52:30 am

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) Monday began hearing oral arguments in a case to determine whether Myanmar has violated the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention).

The Gambia filed an application instituting proceedings against Myanmar concerning alleged violations of the Genocide Convention on November 11, 2019. The Gambia also filed an application for the indication of provisional measures. In the proceedings that ensued, the court granted certain provisional measures. Myanmar then made preliminary objections to the court’s jurisdiction and the admissibility of the Application.

Myanmar Junta Asks UN's Top Court to Drop Rohingya Genocide Case at Hearing in The Hague

Irrawaddy
By AFP 22 February 2022

The junta’s delegation defends Myanmar in the genocide case at a public hearings at the ICJ on Feb. 21, 2022. / ICJ

Myanmar hit out Monday at a genocide case brought against it by Gambia for alleged persecution of Rohingya Muslims, urging the UN’s highest court to drop the claim on legal grounds.

Gambia dragged Myanmar before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2019, accusing the predominantly Buddhist country of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority after a bloody 2017 military crackdown.

ျမန္မာအေပၚ ICJ ရဲ့ လာမယ့္ တရားစီရင္ေရး နဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ လို႔ သိသင့္တဲ့အခ်က္ေတြ

B B C

ဘီဘီစီၿမန္မာပိုင္း
၁၈ ေဖေဖာ္ဝါရီ ၂၀၂၂

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္တြင္းက ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြအေပၚ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအေနနဲ႔ လူမ်ိဳးတုံးေစတဲ့ ရာဇဝတ္မႈေတြကို က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့ တယ္ဆိုၿပီး ဂမ္ဘီယာနိုင္ငံက ကုလသမဂၢရဲ့ အျမင့္ဆုံး တရား႐ုံးျဖစ္တဲ့ အျပည္ျပည္ဆိုင္ရာတရား႐ုံး (International Court of Justice - ICJ) ကေန တရားစီရင္ေပးဖို႔ ဦးတိုက္ေလၽွာက္ထားခဲ့တဲ့အတြက္ ျမန္မာ အေနနဲ႔ တရားရင္ဆိုင္ေနရရာမွာ လာမယ့္ ေဖေဖာ္ဝါရီလ ၂၁ ရက္ကေန ၂၈ ရက္အထိ လုပ္မယ့္တရားစီရင္ ေရး နဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ ေအာက္ပါအတိုင္း အက်ဥ္း႐ုံး ရွင္းျပထားပါတယ္။

(Human Rights Watch က ထုတ္ျပန္တဲ့ Developments in Gambia's Case Against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice ပါ အခ်က္ အလက္ေတြနဲ႔ The Pennsylvania State Universityက Professor တေယာက္ လည္းျဖစ္၊ Arakan Rohingya Union က Director Generalလည္း ျဖစ္တဲ့ ေဒါက္ တာ ဝါကာ အူဒင္က ဘီဘီစီရဲ့ အေမးေတြကို ေျဖၾကားထားခ်က္ေတြ ၊ အမ်ိဳးသားညီညြတ္ေရးအစိုးရ (NUG) က ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ေတြအေပၚမွာ အေျခခံၿပီး ေရးသားထားပါတယ္။)

ICJ ႏိုင္ငံတကာတရား႐ုံးမွာ ခုခံေခ်ပဖို႔ ျမန္မာကိုယ္စား လွယ္အဖြဲ႕ထြက္ခြာ

VOA
ဗီြအိုေအ (ျမန္မာဌာန)
18 ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီ၊ 2022 

FILE - The building of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is seen in The Hague, Netherlands, Dec. 9, 2019

ICJ ႏိုင္ငံတကာတရာ႐ုံးမွာ ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြအေပၚ လူမ်ိဳးတုံးသတ္ျဖတ္မႈနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚ တရားစြဲထားတဲ့ အမႈအတြက္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ေရွ႕ေနအသစ္ငွားထားတယ္လို႔ စစ္ေကာင္စီေျပာခြင့္ရက ဗြီအိုေအ ကို ေျပာပါတယ္။ ေရွ႕ေနအသစ္ ဘယ္သူဘယ္ဝါျဖစ္တယ္ဆိုတာ မေျပာေပမယ့္ အရင္ေရွ႕ေနအဖြဲ႕ က ႏုတ္ထြက္သြားသူအ စား ေရွ႕ေနသစ္နဲ႔ အရင္ေရွ႕ေနအဖြဲ႕ထဲက ၂ ေယာက္တို႔ အတူခုခံေခ်ပသြားမယ္လို႔ေျပာပါတယ္။ ေဖေဖာ္ဝါရီ ၂၁ ရက္စတင္မယ့္ တရား႐ုံးၾကားနာပြဲအတြက္ စစ္ေကာင္စီရဲ႕ အျပည္ျပည္ဆိုင္ရာဆက္ဆံေရးဝန္ႀကီး ဦး ေဆာင္ တဲ့အဖြဲ႕လည္း Netherlands ႏိုင္ငံ The Hague ၿမိဳ႕ကို ထြက္ခြာသြားၿပီလို႔ေျပာပါတယ္။ ရန္ကုန္က လာ တဲ့ သတင္းအျပည့္အစုံကို မခင္ျဖဴေထြးက တင္ျပေပးထားပါတယ္။

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Sebastian Strangio

February 03, 2022

Assuming responsibility for the ICJ case is a means for the National Unity Government to assert its position as Myanmar’s legitimate government.

Myanmar’s opposition National Unity Government (NUG) says that it has accepted the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to hear claims that the country committed genocide against the Rohingya minority group, after formally withdrawing “all preliminary objections” in the case.

More than 100 UK MPs want intervention in The Gambia’s Rohingya genocide case

The Daily Star 

Star Online Report
December 18, 2020

 

Photo: AFP/File 

More than 100 UK MPs have called on the British government to make an intervention supporting The Gambia's Rohingya genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), as human rights violations against the Rohingyas continue.

"Ending impunity is essential not only to ensure justice and uphold international law, but also to deter further international crimes by the military in Myanmar," according to a letter to the UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Dominic Raab MP, issued on December 17.

Gambia: 'Gambia Launches Myanmar Case to Awaken Conscience of World'

all Africa

The Point (Banjul)
30 November 2020

Reporting on the state of the human rights case filed at the International Court of Justice in The Hague against Myanmar for acts of genocide perpetrated against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, the Minister of Justice of The Gambia, Dawda Jallow reminded the meeting that the case was launched 'to awaken the conscience of the world' in support of the rights of the Rohingya.

Minister Jallow made the remarks while updating the 47th Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the OIC in Niamey, Niger on Friday.

"The case represents the OIC's strong commitment to the Islamic teaching of brotherhood, justice and accountability for human rights violations," he said, stressing that the move was among the noblest initiatives ever of the Islamic organisation.

While outlining the successes registered thus far in litigating the case with the support of a US-based international advocacy firm, the Minister appealed to member states to "urgently double up" on financial contributions to the legal fees of the case.

The Gambia v Myanmar: Proceeding on the merits

UNB

UNB News
Publish- October 30, 2020,
Dhaka Courier

UNB file photo

On October 23, The Gambia filed a more than 500-page Memorial, which also includes more than 5000 pages of supporting material, in its lawsuit against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, making its case for how the Government of Myanmar is responsible for genocide against its own Rohingya population.

Rohingya: Bangladesh seeks Egypt's support for Gambia at ICJ

UNB

UNB News

Dhaka

Publish- October 25, 2020,

Bangladesh has requested Egypt to continue providing required support to The Gambia over the Rohingya issue at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as a leading OIC member country.

Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen made the request when outgoing Ambassador of Egypt Walid Ahmed Shamseldin met him on Sunday.

The Gambia on Friday filed a more than 500-page Memorial, which also includes over 5,000 pages of supporting material, in its lawsuit against Myanmar at the ICJ in The Hague, making its case for how the government of Myanmar is responsible for genocide against Rohingya.

Rohingya: Gambia files case against Myanmar at ICJ

AA

SM Najmus Sakib 

DHAKA, Bangladesh 

24.10.2020

Activists, Bangladesh welcome move as Myanmar urged to comply with orders of international court

Gambia has filed its case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the alleged genocide of the Rohingya in a move widely hailed by the Muslim minority group, as well as refugee host country Bangladesh.

Over 500 pages, the memorial submitted Friday also includes more than 5,000 pages of supporting materials, while Rohingya rights groups have urged Myanmar to immediately comply with earlier ICJ orders to prevent ongoing acts of genocide and preserve evidence of genocide against Rohingya Muslims.

Myanmar Genocide Lawsuit Is Filed at United Nations Court

The New York Times 

By Marlise Simons

Updated Jan. 23, 2020

Continue reading the mai

Gambia, on behalf of Rohingya Muslims, opens an international dispute with Myanmar in an effort to have the country’s leadership tried for genocide.

Rohingya refugees from Myanmar after crossing into Bangladesh in September 2017.Credit...Adam Dean for The New York Times

PARIS — An arsenal of international laws has failed to confront the impunity of Myanmar’s government and security forces for their deadly purge of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee a campaign of rape, arson and killing.

But on Monday, Gambia filed a lawsuit accusing Myanmar of genocide, summoning the case before the United Nations’ highest court in an effort to open a legal path against the country’s authorities.

Can a Lawsuit Stop a Genocide?

COMMONWEAL

By Paul C. Saunders

October 13, 2020

 

The case against Myanmar 

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh (Alamy/Mahady Hasan Riad)

On January 23, 2020, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, informally known as the World Court, rendered a historic judgment. The decree ordered the government of Myanmar to comply with several directives: to take measures to prevent genocide against the Rohingya people; to ensure that its military refrain from acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention; and to preserve evidence and submit a report to the court within four months, detailing compliance with the court’s order. The unanimous decision by the fifteen-judge court represented only the third time that the Genocide Convention has been invoked before the World Court in a contentious case—and the first case ever to consider the claims, under the convention, of non-contiguous, non-warring countries.