Rohingya justice: Why the ICJ's public rebuke of Myanmar matters

Aljazeera
by Tun Khin
2020.02.07

The ICJ's order that Myanmar does all it can to prevent genocide offers the Rohingya hope for the future.

Gambian Justice Minister Abubacarr Tambadou and Tun Khin seen at the ICJ as they attend the ruling in the case filed by the Gambia against Myanmar in January 2020 [File: Courtesy of Tun Khin]

 

On January 23, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague imposed emergency "provisional measures" on Myanmar regarding its actions against and treatment of the Rohingya minority - my people. To the average person this may sound like incomprehensible legalese. But for many Rohingya, who had long been waiting for the international community to take meaningful action to end their suffering, this was some of the best news they had ever received.

International Court of Justice orders Myanmar to prevent genocide against Rohingya

5 PILLARS

2020.01.25 

 Rohingya refugees in a camp in Cox Bazaar, Bangladesh.

The International Court of Justice has ordered measures to prevent the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
The panel of 17 judges at the ICJ on Thursday voted unanimously to order Myanmar to take “all measures within its power” to prevent genocide, which they said the Rohingya remained at serious risk of.

Myanmar Rohingya: World court orders prevention of genocide

B B C

23 January 2020

More than half a million Muslims are still believed to live in Myanmar's Rakhine state 

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ordered measures to prevent the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (formerly Burma).

The decision comes despite de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi defending her country against the accusations in person last month.

Thousands of Rohingya died and more than 700,000 fled to Bangladesh during an army crackdown in 2017.

Rohingya Hail UN Ruling Ordering Myanmar to Prevent Genocide

Snopes

Associated Press
Published 23 January 2020

 

The United Nations' top court ordered Myanmar to take all measures in its power to prevent genocide against the Rohingya people, delivering a sweeping legal victory for the Muslim minority. 

 

Image via AP Photo/Peter Dejong

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The United Nations’ top court ordered Myanmar to take all measures in its power to prevent genocide against the Rohingya people, delivering a sweeping legal victory for the Muslim minority.

The ruling came despite appeals last month by Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi for the International Court of Justice to drop the case amid her denials of genocide by the armed forces that once held the former pro-democracy champion under house arrest for 15 years.

International court orders Myanmar to protect Rohingya minority

THE ------
GLOBAL
AND------
MAIL-----
2020.01.24

The International Court of Justice has ordered Myanmar to prevent genocide against its Rohingya minority

In its unanimous 17-0 decision, the top United Nations court rejected Myanmar’s argument that the deaths of 10,000 Rohingya, and flight of 700,000 others to neighbouring Bangladesh, was part of an “internal military conflict.”

The court decided that the situation is still urgent enough to order emergency interim measures. It also demanded that all evidence related to the allegations of a 2016-2017 genocide be preserved, though it will likely be years before the ICJ reaches a final ruling on whether the violence that occurred amounted to a genocide.

• Opinion: It’s time for justice for the Rohingya community – and women can’t be left behind

Got a news tip that you’d like us to look into? E-mail us at tips@globeandmail.com Need to share documents securely? Reach out via SecureDrop

 

Link:https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-morning-update-coronavirus-updates-international-court-orders/

Top UN court orders Myanmar to prevent Rohingya genocide

GULF TIMES
AFP/The Hague
Thursday، 23 January 2020

The UN’s highest court ordered Myanmar yesterday to do everything in its power to prevent the alleged genocide of Rohingya Muslims, as international justice stepped into the crisis for the first time.

The International Court of Justice rejected arguments made by Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi in The Hague in December and set out urgent steps for the majority Buddhist nation to end the violence.

Will Myanmar respect ICJ order to protect Rohingya from genocide?

Al Jazeera
Mia Swart

2020.01.23

Experts celebrate landmark ruling, but have little hope that gov't which denies genocide will prevent further violence.

Women and children fleeing violence in their villages arrive at the Yathae Taung township in Rakhine State in Myanmar on August 26, 2017 [Wai Moe/AFP/Getty Images]

In a ruling that the Rohingya minority have celebrated, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ordered Myanmar to take urgent measures to protect the mostly Muslim minority.

On Thursday, a panel of 17 judges unanimously decided that Myanmar should take "all measures within its power" to prevent genocide, following a case filed by The Gambia in November.

ICJ တရား႐ုံးဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္အေပၚ အျမင္တခ်ိဳ႕

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အာရွအသံ ( RFA )
2020.01.23


ဂမ္ဘီယာနိုင္ငံက ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံကို ICJ အျပည္ျပည္ဆိုင္ရာတရား႐ုံးမွာ တရားစြဲထားတဲ့အေပၚ တရားသူႀကီး ေတြက ဒီေန႔ ဇန္နဝါရီလ ၂၃ ရက္ေန႔ နယ္သာလန္နိုင္ငံ ေဒသစံေတာ္ခ်ိန္ မနက္ ၁ဝ နာရီမွာ ၾကားျဖတ္ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ (၄) ခ်က္ ခ်မွတ္လိုက္ပါတယ္။

ဒီဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္နဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ နယ္သာလန္နိုင္ငံ သည္ဟိဂ္ၿမိဳ႕က ICJ တရား႐ုံးကို တက္ေရာက္နားေထာင္ ခဲ့တဲ့ လန္ဒန္ၿမိဳ႕အေျခစိုက္BROUK အဖြဲ႕ဥကၠ႒ ကိုထြန္းခင္၊ တရား႐ုံးေရွ႕ကို သြားေရာက္ဝန္းရံခဲ့တဲ့ နယ္ သာ လန္နိုင္ငံက ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္ (ေလ) တပ္ဖြဲ႕ဝင္ေဟာင္း ဦးခင္ေမာင္ေအးရဲ့ သေဘာထားေတြကို RFA ဝိုင္းေတာ္သား ကိုေနရိန္ေက်ာ္ SKYPE ကေန ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္း တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။

လင့္၊https://www.rfa.org/burmese/program_2/icj-comments-hague-01232020095948.html

Is Myanmar guilty of genocide?

THE ASEAN POST
Sheith Khidhir
22 January 2020

 Rohingya refugees watch on a mobile phone a live feed of Myanmar's State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi's appearance at the UN's International Court of Justice, in a refugee camp in Cox's Bazar on 11 December, 2019.

It was recently reported that Myanmar had conceded that it had committed “war crimes” against its Rohingya Muslim community. This is as far as Myanmar has ever gone in admitting responsibility for the atrocities committed against its Rohingya minority. Still, to some observers, this is not good enough.

War crimes, not genocide committed against Rohingya: Myanmar probe

Bangkok Post
21 Jan 2020

A Rohingya refugee reacts while holding his dead son after crossing the Naf river from Myanmar into Bangladesh on October 9, 2017, about two months after operations by the Myanmar military began. 

YANGON - A Myanmar-appointed panel concluded Monday that some soldiers likely committed war crimes against its Rohingya Muslim community but the military was not guilty of genocide, findings swiftly condemned by rights groups.

War crimes, not genocide committed against Rohingya: Myanmar probe

AFP
20 January' 2020

A Rohingya refugee reacts while holding his dead son after crossing the Naf river from Myanmar into Bangladesh on October 9, 2017, about two months after operations by the Myanmar military began

Myanmar-appointed panel concluded Monday that some soldiers likely committed war crimes against its Rohingya Muslim community but the military was not guilty of genocide, findings swiftly condemned by rights groups.

Rohingya group blasts panel report on violence against community

theSundaily
21 Jan 2020

Rohingya refugees gather near the fence in the “no man’s land” zone between Myanmar and Bangladesh border as seen from Maungdaw, Rakhine state during a government-organized visit for journalists on Aug 24, 2018 — AFP

 

KUALA LUMPUR: A UK-based Rohingya group Monday dismissed a report published by Myanmar’s Independent Commission of Enquiry (ICOE) the same day which concluded that no evidence of genocide was found despite proof of war crimes committed by some members of Myanmar security forces.

Myanmar finds war crimes but no genocide in Rohingya crackdown

Aljazeera
2020.01.21
ICOE report comes days before UN's top court issues ruling on whether urgent measures are necessary to stop genocide.

Rohingya, who have lived in Myanmar for generations, fled to Bangladesh in 2017 and are fearful of returning without guarantees on their rights and citizenship [File: Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters]

A commission set up to investigate the 2017 crackdown in Rakhine that led hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim Rohingya to flee Myanmar, has concluded that while some soldiers probably committed war crimes there was no genocide.

The Independent Commission of Enquiry (ICOE) released the findings of its investigation, but not the full report, to the country's president on Monday, a few days before the United Nations' top court is set to rule on whether to impose urgent measures to stop the alleged continuing genocide in Myanmar. 

The Rohingya finally got their day in court. For most of them it was a first.

The Washington Post 

Christian Caryl  

Op-ed Editor/International

Dec. 14, 2019

Rohingya refugees watch a live feed of Aung San Suu Kyi's appearance at the UN's International Court of Justice in The Hague on Dec. 11. (MUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFP via Getty Images) 

An extraordinary event took place in the Netherlands this week: a hearing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that is a first small step toward justice for one of the world’s longest-suffering minority groups.

The fight for justice over Myanmar's Rohingya 'genocide'

Dhaka Tribune 

AFP  

December 8th, 2019

File photo: Rohingya refugees attend a ceremony organised to remember the second anniversary of a military crackdown that prompted a massive exodus of people from Myanmar to Bangladesh, at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Ukhia on August 25, 2019 AFP

The International Criminal Court (ICC) also approved an investigation into the 2017 military crackdown that forced some 740,000 Rohingya to flee into Bangladesh

Myanmar is facing a barrage of legal challenges in an attempt to hold it accountable over the alleged genocide against its Rohingyas population.

International Rohingya Youth Conference in london discussion with Tun Khin

Rvision
04 December 2019

Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5bC7bChDKY

Justice, Argentina and ‘universal jurisdiction’

Frontier
MYANMAR

By THOMAS KEAN | FRONTIER 

Wednesday, December 04, 2019 

In the second of our two-part series on justice and accountability in Rakhine State, we examine the use of “universal jurisdiction” in Argentina and the problems with Myanmar’s own investigation into allegations of abuses.

THE WHEELS of justice are moving in regards to Rakhine State across a range of institutions and countries.

In part one of this series we examined the roles of the International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar and Independent Investigative Mission for Myanmar, and recent developments in the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice.

Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi to be investigated for crimes against Rohingya Muslims

Geraldine Doogue   
ABC Radio National
Nov  20, 2019

 Myanmar leader, Aung San Suu Kyi has been named in a case filed in Argentina for crimes against the country's Rohingya Muslims. (AP: Gemunu Amarasinghe)

The International Criminal Court has approved an investigation into alleged crimes against Rohingya Muslims by the government of Myanmar.

The development comes amid a slew of legal efforts to hold the government to account, including a lawsuit filed in Argentina – the first to name former democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

More than 730,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar since a 2017 crackdown by the country's military.

Guest: Tun Khin, Rohingya genocide survivor; President, Burmese Rohingya Organisation (UK)

Producer: Linda Lopresti 

Will cases brought against Myanmar deliver justice to Rohingya?

Aljazeera
Mia Swart

19 November 2019

Genocide case filed at ICJ and Suu Kyi named in lawsuit in Argentina while ICC set to investigate Rohingya crimes.

Thousands of Rohingya have been killed and more than 740,000 have taken shelter in neighbouring Bangladesh since August 2017 [Rafiqur Rahman/Reuters]

Last week, three separate cases were filed against Myanmar for atrocities against Rohingya people in the first international legal attempts to bring justice to the persecuted Muslim minority.

The Gambia brought a genocide case against Myanmar on November 11 in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), urging the United Nations court to order measures to immediately stop atrocities and genocide against its own Rohingya people.

Rohingyas see a ray of hope

The Daily Star
November 16, 2019
Porimol Palma

Lawsuit at UN court, ICC genocide probe seen as major steps towards fight for justice

 The Rohingyas, who have been facing rights abuses in Myanmar for decades, now see a ray of hope of getting justice following a lawsuit with the highest UN court and the ICC’s approval to probe crimes against them.

Leaders of the persecuted community believe the steps will help mount pressure on Myanmar to grant them citizenship and other rights.