ICJ is due to rule on the Rohingya genocide case. Here's what you need to know

ICJ is due to rule on the Rohingya genocide case. Here's what you need to know

Submitted by Sondos Asem on Thu, 11/05/2026 - 11:06 UN's top court sets 19 November as date for landmark judgment in case brought by Gambia against Myanmar Off

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule on whether Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya, in a judgment that could see the court hold a state responsible for genocide for the first time.

Officials announced on Tuesday that the court's president, Judge Yuji Iwasawa, would read the judgment at a public sitting at the Peace Palace in The Hague at 10am local time on 19 November. 

The ruling will be final and binding, with no right of appeal.

Several governments have already described the violence as genocide, including the US and Canada.

Legal experts say they expect the outcome to have consequences for other ICJ cases involving allegations of genocide, most pressingly South Africa's case against Israel over its war against Palestinians in Gaza, where the confirmed death toll has reached almost 75,000 people.

The case, brought by the Gambia in 2019, concerns the Myanmar military's 2017 violence in Rakhine State, which drove more than 700,000 Rohingya into neighbouring Bangladesh and involved widely documented massacres and rapes. 

About 1.2 million Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim minority, now live in camps around Cox's Bazar, the world's largest refugee settlement.

Myanmar has denied committing genocide, saying its forces were responding to insurgents from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (Arsa), whose attacks on police posts in August 2017 killed 12 security personnel.

Antonia Mulvey, an international human rights lawyer who investigated sexual violence against the Rohingya for the UN in 2017, told Middle East Eye's Expert Witness Podcast that horrific sexual violence was central to the Gambia's argument that genocide took place.

"One individual said to me, 'I was lucky, I was only raped by three men,'" said Mulvey, whose organisation, Legal Action Worldwide, now represents Rohingya witnesses in the case.

"They would rape women and girls in public, in front of their family members, in front of their children, in communal areas. I heard of mass gang rapes, sometimes up to 40 women and girls at the time."

What is the case about?

The Gambia accuses Myanmar of breaching the 1948 Genocide Convention during its campaign against the Rohingya from 25 August 2017. 

The operations were carried out under Min Aung Hlaing, then the military's commander-in-chief. 

Myanmar at the time had a civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, but the military-drafted constitution left the armed forces outside its control.

In February 2021, Min Aung Hlaing overthrew Suu Kyi's government in a coup, and in April this year he stepped down as army chief.

He was later elected president by a parliament dominated by military-backed lawmakers, following elections organised by the junta.

Rohingya fled mass killings, rape and the burning of villages during what the military described as "clearance operations".

The case is a dispute between states, so the court will decide whether Myanmar as a state is responsible, not whether any individual is guilty. 

A finding against Myanmar would arguably add to international pressure on Min Aung Hlaing, whose move to the presidency is widely perceived as a bid for international legitimacy.

How did it start?

In 2018, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar concluded that there was sufficient information to infer genocidal intent and recommended that senior military officials be investigated and prosecuted for genocide.

On 11 November 2019, the Gambia filed its case at the ICJ with the backing of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). 

The Rohingya case that could redefine the law on genocide Read More »

It was the first time a state not directly affected had brought a genocide case before the court. 

The west African country relied on the principle that every state party to the 1948 Genocide Convention has a common interest in seeing it upheld.

In December 2019, Aung San Suu Kyi, then Myanmar's civilian leader, appeared at the court to deny the allegations. 

In January 2020, after finding “a real and imminent risk of irreparable prejudice to the rights” of the Rohingya under the Genocide Convention, the court ordered Myanmar to prevent genocidal acts and preserve evidence.

The court rejected Myanmar's objections to its jurisdiction in July 2022, and heard the merits of the case from 12-29 January 2026, including closed-door testimony from Rohingya witnesses.

Eleven states have intervened: Belgium, Canada, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, France, Germany, the Republic of Ireland, the Maldives, the Netherlands, Slovenia and the United Kingdom.

Mike Becker, an assistant professor of international human rights law at Trinity College Dublin and a former associate legal officer at the ICJ, told MEE the judgment would be the first merits judgment in a case with large-scale intervention by third states.

"Cases like the Gambia v Myanmar have arguably sought to transform the role and function of the ICJ in contemporary affairs. The outcome here may determine whether that trend will continue," Becker said.

What are the arguments?

The Gambia argued that genocidal intent is the only reasonable inference to be drawn from the Myanmar military's conduct. 

It relied on four acts listed in the convention: killing; causing serious bodily or mental harm; inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy the group; and measures intended to prevent births.

Mulvey said the Gambia pointed to around 10,000 killings, which she described as a conservative estimate, and to decades of restrictions on Rohingya marriage, births, movement and access to healthcare.

Myanmar denies genocide. It argues the operations were a counterterrorism response to Arsa, that there is no direct evidence of intent, and that the UN fact-finding mission's reports should not be given evidentiary weight.

Myanmar has submitted 12 reports on its compliance with the 2020 order. The Gambia has said these give "no reason to conclude" that Myanmar complied.

Why is sexual violence central?

Mulvey said she documented a consistent pattern across the townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung, in which soldiers surrounded villages, opened fire, set homes alight and then selected women and girls for rape.

She said survivors described gang rapes carried out in public and in front of their families, women held in military camps for weeks, mutilation, and soldiers telling them: "We will kill you by raping you."

One woman told Mulvey she had been eight months pregnant when she was hanged from a tree and raped by nine men, most of them soldiers. Her unborn child died. Her account was included in the fact-finding mission's report and later read out at the ICJ.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ruled in 1998 that rape can constitute genocide. The ICJ has accepted the principle, but has never found a state responsible on that basis.

Mulvey said such a finding would be "a landmark decision".

"It was the scale and the brutality of the sexual violence that we didn't see in previous cases before the International Court of Justice, such as before Bosnia and Croatia," she said.

Why does it matter under international law?

The judgment will be only the third time the ICJ has ruled on the merits of a genocide case, and the first in more than a decade.

In 2007, the court found that genocide was committed at Srebrenica but held Serbia responsible only for failing to prevent and punish it.

'It was the scale and the brutality of the sexual violence that we didn't see in previous cases before the International Court of Justice'

– Antonia Mulvey, human rights lawyer

In 2015, it found that genocide had not been proven in Croatia's case against Serbia.

Furthermore, how the court applies the “only reasonable inference” test is expected to be a central legal question addressed by the judgment. 

The test governs how genocidal intent, meaning the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, can be proven when there is no direct evidence of it, such as an explicit order or policy document. In this case, it would require proving whether any explanation other than genocide could reasonably account for what happened in Rakhine.

The Gambia argues that the scale, pattern and brutality of the 2017 operations meet that test. 

It points to the mass killings, the systematic rape of women and girls, and decades of discriminatory policies against the Rohingya.

“Here we don’t have a physical document that shows that, but it was the whole pattern that we saw,” Mulvey said.

Myanmar argues that other reasonable inferences can be drawn, chiefly that its forces were conducting counterterrorism operations against Arsa.

At the January hearings, its counsel also argued that the military’s aim was to drive the Rohingya out of the country, not to destroy them.

Chris Sidoti, a former member of the UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar, told MEE that the ruling would also show how the court approaches establishing facts and the weight given to reports from UN human rights mechanisms.

"The International Court of Justice is not a fact-finding tribunal. It doesn't have an investigative arm, and mostly it makes decisions that are purely legal questions," said Sidoti, who now sits on the UN Commission of Inquiry on Palestine and Israel. "Here it's got a fact-finding task ahead of it."

Will the ICJ lower the genocide threshold?

In October, US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz accused Navi Pillay, the Nobel Peace laureate and the ad hoc judge appointed by the Gambia, of "tipping the scales", saying she intended to lower the threshold for proving genocide so it could be used against America and its allies.

Mulvey rejected the claim as "misleading".

"The Gambia is very clear in its submissions; they are not asking the court to lower the threshold [for genocide]. Rather, they are saying the threshold has been met," she said.

What do the victims want?

Rohingya survivors want the court to find Myanmar responsible for genocide and to order the return of their land and property, compensation and prosecutions. 

Above all, they want citizenship, which they are denied under Myanmar's 1982 citizenship law, said Mulvey. 

If the court finds Myanmar responsible, it will also find that Myanmar must make reparation to the Rohingya, though it may defer the question of remedies to a later phase, Becker said.

The remedy the court orders "could be groundbreaking, especially if the ICJ requires Myanmar to undertake domestic reforms to guarantee basic rights of citizenship and non-discrimination to the Rohingya", he said.

"Decades on, they don't forget what has happened to them or to their families," Mulvey said. "At the very minimum, they want recognition."

What happens next?

Myanmar is bound to comply with the judgment. If it does not, the Gambia can refer the matter to the UN Security Council, which has never used its power to enforce an ICJ ruling.

Becker said enforcement may prove impossible while the military remains in power, but "compliance with the ICJ judgment may become the price of readmission to the international community". 

A finding against Myanmar could also increase pressure on other states to disengage from the ICJ, he said.

Myanmar has been embroiled in civil war since the 2021 coup, and the Arakan Army, an ethnic armed group, now controls most of Rakhine State.

Separately, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court applied in November 2024 for an arrest warrant for Min Aung Hlaing, then the military's commander-in-chief, over the deportation and persecution of the Rohingya. Judges have not publicly ruled on the request.

“We want to see that arrest warrant issued, and also that arrest warrants are requested for other senior members of the Myanmar military,” Mulvey said.

In February 2025, a court in Argentina ordered arrest warrants for 25 Myanmar officials, including Min Aung Hlaing and Aung San Suu Kyi, in a case brought under the legal principle that atrocity crimes can be prosecuted anywhere. 

Because the court relies on precedents as part of its sources, the case will have implications on the other genocide-related cases pending before the ICJ: Ukraine v Russia, South Africa v Israel, Nicaragua v Germany and the Democratic Republic of the Congo v Rwanda.

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