Rohingya Genocide case legitimate, The Gambia tells UN top court

Lawyers for The Gambia have urged the United Nations’s top court to throw out Myanmar’s legal bid to end a case accusing the Southeast Asian nation of genocide against Rohingya Muslims, after the Buddhist nation tried to get the case dismissed. Banjul dragged Myanmar before the International Court of Justice in 2019, accusing it of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority following a bloody 2017 military crackdown. “We seek to protect not only the rights of the Rohingya, but our own rights as a state party to the genocide convention,” The Gambia’s attorney general Dawda Jallow told the court on Wednesday. They were doing that “by holding Myanmar to its … obligation not to commit genocide, not to incite genocide and to prevent unpunished genocide,” he added. “These violations of the genocide convention are a stain on our collective conscience and it would be irresponsible to pretend that it is not our business,” the Gambian lawyer told judges. In court on Monday, Myanmar struck out at The Gambia for having brought the case before the Hague-based ICJ, set up after World War II to rule in disputes between countries. Its lawyers accused The Gambia of not acting as a “country in its own right”, but as a proxy for the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, a 57-member body set up in 1969 to represent global Muslim interests.

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