NOVEMBER 15 — On November 19, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) will deliver its judgment in The Gambia v. Myanmar, a case concerning Myanmar’s alleged violations of the Genocide Convention. For our Rohingya community, this is more than a moment in international law. It follows decades of persecution and nearly ten years of waiting for the world to acknowledge what we have known: that we have endured a campaign of destruction because of who we are.
Yet, the conversation is being pulled away from the people whose lives are at stake.
In September, a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Orde F. Kittrie and Andres B. Munoz-Mosquera warned that the ICJ could lower the legal threshold for establishing genocide in the Rohingya case. The authors connected this possibility to South Africa’s pending genocide case against Israel and potential claims against the United States, Nato members even suggesting sanctions against ICJ judges.
