NEWS
The International Court of Justice deliberates on the Rohingya genocide
June 2026
The fact
Five years after the February 2021 coup, Myanmar remains one of the world's largest and least-followed humanitarian emergencies: nearly 5.2 million displaced, acute food insecurity, and air strikes on civilians that rose from a few dozen in the coup's first year to more than 3,300 in 2025-26, with over 3,800 civilians killed by air strikes alone. After elections held between December 2025 and January 2026 in only 263 of 330 townships — almost all in military-controlled areas, with the National League for Democracy and dozens of opposition parties excluded and many leaders still detained — coup leader Min Aung Hlaing became president in April 2026; the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said the process failed to respect citizens' fundamental rights, and the International Crisis Group describes it as a civilian façade behind which the military retains control. On the judicial front, from 12 to 29 January 2026 the International Court of Justice held merits hearings in The Gambia v. Myanmar, under the Genocide Convention, over the 2017 campaign against the Muslim Rohingya minority — more than 700,000 people who fled to Bangladesh, with genocidal intent found by the UN Fact-Finding Mission. A judgment is expected during 2026. Myanmar rejects the accusations: its lawyers warned against selective readings and over-reliance on NGO reports, and throughout the proceedings never uttered the word “Rohingya”, using the term “Bengali”, which the UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar calls pejorative.
Legal commentary
This is the first case in more than a decade in which the International Court of Justice examines a genocide allegation on the merits (1948 Genocide Convention, art. IX). Its force lies in the principle erga omnes partes: The Gambia, a distant and uninvolved State, acts because every State party shares a common interest in preventing and punishing genocide — a shared duty, not a bilateral matter. The criminal track is separate and personal: in November 2024 the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested an arrest warrant for Min Aung Hlaing for the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya; in February 2025 an Argentine court issued warrants under universal jurisdiction. To these are added the war crimes documented by the UN Independent Investigative Mechanism — strikes on homes, hospitals and schools, the blocking of aid as collective punishment (Fourth Geneva Convention, Rome Statute). As a case still under deliberation, there is no judgment: the genocide is found by the UN Mission and inferred from a pattern of conduct, but not yet adjudicated by the Court.
Implications
Here the law is measured by its coherence. The decision in The Gambia v. Myanmar will shape the two other genocide cases pending before the same Court — South Africa v. Israel and Ukraine v. Russia: the same Convention, the same evidentiary threshold for intent, the same question of who has the duty to apply it. But coherence also holds within the conflict: the Rohingya are trapped between the junta and the Arakan Army, and the UN Mechanism is investigating grave abuses by both sides — executions, arson, forced recruitment; while the junta's war machine is fuelled by weapons from China, Russia and India. And yet, with millions displaced and — according to ACLED — the most fragmented conflict in the world, international attention remains marginal relative to the scale of the crisis. This is precisely the gap between gravity and attention that this platform exists to document: the law applies to everyone, or it applies to no one.
Sources: Al Jazeera · UN News · OHCHR · IIMM