This week, after years of preliminary legal arguments, the case concerning Myanmar’s alleged brutal treatment of the Rohingya people opened at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
There, in the weeks to come, expert witnesses and survivors will recount, in terrible detail, how a Muslim minority in Rakhine state was ethnically cleansed from its homes and subjected to horrific cruelty – rape, mass killings and systematic persecution – by a state. Myanmar stands accused of violating the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
For many, this case means nothing.
Myanmar is far from the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. The Rohingya’s suffering has often barely made the news. If you were not a human rights expert reading reports in the summer of 2017, you may not know that these crimes began when the Myanmar military launched a massive “clearance operation”, triggering an exodus of more than 700,000 people to Bangladesh in just a few months.
Amnesty International documented widespread murder and crimes against humanity, including the burning of
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