Top UN court to rule on Myanmar genocide case

The UN's top court will announce Thursday if it will allow a case accusing Myanmar of genocide against Rohingya Muslims to go ahead and if it will impose emergency measures to stop further violence.

The ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) comes days after a Myanmar commission concluded that some soldiers likely committed war crimes against the minority group but that the military was not guilty of genocide.

Myanmar's civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi travelled to The Hague in December to personally defend her Buddhist-majority country against the allegations over the bloody 2017 crackdown against the Rohingya.

The mainly Muslim African nation of The Gambia brought the case against Myanmar after 740,000 Rohingya fled over the border into Bangladesh, carrying accounts of widespread rape, arson and mass killings.

"The first question is whether or not the Court will declare to have jurisdiction. My guess is that that will be the case, although you never know," Willem van Genugten, professor emeritus of international law at Tilburg University, told AFP.

If the court approves so-called "provisional measures" sought by Gambia those "might, next to that, entail a lot of things, from very general to very specific. That remains to be seen as well."
But it ruled out genocide, saying: "There is insufficient evidence to argue, much less conclude, that the crimes committed were undertaken with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical (sic), racial or religious group."