World's Top Court to Rule on Whether Myanmar Committed Genocide Against Rohingya

On Thursday morning in The Hague, judges of the International Court of Justice will deliver a verdict on whether Myanmar committed genocide against its Rohingya minority. The court has never found a state responsible for genocide, a crime defined in the aftermath of the Holocaust. A ruling against Myanmar would be a first, and the case is being watched as one of the most significant moments in international law since the end of the second world war.

The case was brought by the Gambia, a Muslim-majority state, which argues that Myanmar's repression of the Rohingya breached the 1948 UN genocide convention. The judges have spent seven years weighing it. Nearly a decade has passed since a military campaign forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee across the border into Bangladesh. Yanghee Lee, a former UN rights investigator to Myanmar, called the ruling historic for survivors and their families, and said the international community failed to prevent the atrocities nine years ago and must now seize the chance to secure justice.

The legal difficulty lies in proving intent. The convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Two earlier ICJ cases on atrocities in the Balkans stopped short of finding states directly responsible for genocide, though Serbia was held legally responsible for failing to prevent the genocide at Srebrenica. Antonia Mulvey, founder of Legal Action Worldwide, which represents hundreds of Rohingya survivors, said she was cautiously optimistic. She argues that the state's actions show patterns of conduct: villages were attacked in the same way, civilians were assaulted, homes burned, men and women separated, sexual violence committed, and people killed as they fled.

Mulvey said a key question will be how the judgment treats rape and sexual violence as acts of genocide. Her team has gathered accounts of soldiers mutilating women's genitals and biting their faces, which she described as a way to mark people and to stop reproduction. In January the court held closed-door sessions to hear directly from survivors who travelled from camps in Bangladesh. According to Law, one witness said her child was taken from her arms, stabbed and thrown into a fire; another described seeing piles of bodies in a mass grave. Gambian justice minister Dawda Jallow told the court the case was not about esoteric points of international law but about real people who have been targeted for destruction.

Myanmar denies committing genocide and says its actions were aimed at a military uprising by insurgents. For decades the Rohingya have been stripped of citizenship and subjected to growing discrimination, against a backdrop of communal violence with Buddhists in western Rakhine state. The crisis peaked after a Rohingya militant group carried out guerrilla-style attacks in the summer of 2017, and the army answered with massive "clearance operations." Refugees told the Guardian of a massacre at the village of Tula Toli, describing systematic shooting of civilians and children drowned in a river; satellite footage later showed the village had been razed. That testimony joined dozens of other accounts gathered over the years.

A genocide finding would add pressure on Min Aung Hlaing, who led the military during the 2016-2017 attacks and later overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi's elected government in a 2021 coup, which set off a civil war that has killed tens of thousands. The International Criminal Court, which prosecutes individuals rather than states, is separately investigating him for alleged crimes against humanity. He was installed as civilian president in April after elections widely condemned as a sham, and has been working to rebuild diplomatic ties.

The ruling matters beyond Myanmar. It will offer the strongest hint yet of how judges might approach South Africa's genocide case against Israel over its campaign in Gaza. The cases share features, an ethnic group targeted by a powerful military, though Israel enjoys far stronger backing from the United States. Washington has been on the offensive against international human rights bodies, including sanctioning the ICC, even though it already deems the Rohingya crisis a genocide under a Biden administration decision. Trump's UN ambassador, Mike Waltz, warned that the ICJ "must not be allowed" to set a standard that could be used against "allied soldiers."

The court cannot enforce its rulings, though they have been respected in the past. Supporters say a finding should push states to block arms transfers and jet fuel supplies. The UN security council could lend it force, but divisions between the US and China make that unlikely. More than 1 million Rohingya remain in Bangladesh in the world's largest refugee settlement, and fewer than 600,000 are estimated to remain in Myanmar. One displaced Rohingya inside the country told the Guardian he hopes the verdict will help end decades of persecution, adding: "We are asking for justice, recognition, equal rights." Thursday's judgment will show whether the court's answer reaches that far.