\n The UN's highest court ruled on Friday that a landmark case accusing military-ruled Myanmar of genocide against minority Rohingya Muslims can go ahead.\n<\/p>\n
\n The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague threw out all of Myanmar's objections to a case filed by the west African nation of Gambia in 2019.\n<\/p>\n
\n The decision paves the way for full hearings at the court on allegations over majority-Buddhist Myanmar's bloody 2017 crackdown on the Rohingya.\n<\/p>\n
\n ICJ president Joan Donoghue said the tribunal \"finds that it has jurisdiction... to entertain the application filed by the republic of the Gambia, and that the said application is admissible\".\n<\/p>\n
\n Hundreds of thousands of minority Rohingya fled the southeast Asian country during the operation five years ago, bringing with them harrowing reports of murder, rape and arson.\n<\/p>\n
\n Around 850,000 Rohingya are languishing in camps in neighbouring Bangladesh while another 600,000 Rohingya remain in Myanmar's southwestern Rakhine state.\n<\/p>\n
\n Myanmar was originally represented at the ICJ by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, but she was ousted as civilian leader in a coup last year and is now in detention.\n<\/p>\n
\n Mainly-Muslim Gambia filed the case in November 2019 alleging that Myanmar's treatment of the Rohingya breached the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.\n<\/p>\n
\n - Myanmar's arguments rejected -\n<\/p>\n
\n Myanmar had argued on several grounds that the court had no jurisdiction in the matter, and should dismiss the case while it is still in its preliminary stages.\n<\/p>\n
\n But judges unanimously rejected Myanmar's argument that Gambia was acting as a \"proxy\" of the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in the case.\n<\/p>\n
\n Only states, and not organisations, are allowed to file cases at the ICJ, which has ruled on disputes between countries since just after World War II.\n<\/p>\n
\n They also unanimously dismissed Myanmar's assertions that Gambia could not file the case because it was not a direct party to the alleged genocide, and that Myanmar had opted out of a relevant part of the genocide convention.\n<\/p>\n
\n Finally they threw out by 15-1 Myanmar's claim that there was no formal dispute at the time Gambia filed the case, and that the court therefore had no jurisdiction.\n<\/p>\n
\n It could however take years for full hearings and a final judgment in the case.\n<\/p>\n
\n US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared in March that the Myanmar military's violence against the Rohingya amounted to genocide.\n<\/p>\n
\n The International Criminal Court, a war crimes tribunal based in The Hague, has also launched an investigation into the violence against the Rohingya.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The UN's highest court ruled on Friday that a landmark case accusing military-ruled Myanmar of genocide against minority Rohingya Muslims can go ahead. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague threw out all of Myanmar's objections to a case filed by the west African nation of Gambia in 2019. The decision paves the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-103957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n