Myanmar’s highly anticipated hearing will start on 10th December. A three-day hearing which will ask the 16 member panel of U.N. judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to impose “provisional measures” to protect the Rohingya before the case can be heard in full.
Hearings dealing with the core allegation of genocide could begin in 2020, but cases at the ICJ, the leading U.N. court for disputes between states, often take years. The legal threshold for a finding of genocide is high. Just three cases have been recognised under international law since World War Two: Cambodia in the late 1970s; Rwanda in 1994; and Srebrenica, Bosnia, in 1995.
“Proving genocide has been difficult because of the high bar set by its ‘intent requirement’ – that is showing the genocidal acts, say killings, were carried out with the specific intent to eliminate a people on the basis of their ethnicity,” said Richard Dicker, head of the international justice programme at New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Buddhist majority Myanmar rejects accusations of genocide against the Muslim Rohingya population, but the government declined to provide details about its defence case ahead of the hearings.
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