Gambia assures that it is a “great victory” in the fight “to do justice”
22 (EUROPE PRESS)
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has rejected this Friday the objections presented by the Burmese authorities against the complaint filed by Gambia in November 2019 for the main judicial body of the United Nations to judge the alleged genocide of the Rohingya population in the Asian country .
The court has declared itself competent to try the case and has admitted the request presented by Gambia, as indicated in a statement in which it has thrown out Burma’s objections, which focused on the “lack of jurisdiction” of the court or the “inadmissibility” of the petition filed.
According to Burma, behind the request was, in fact, the Organization for Islamic Cooperation, an international organization that groups Muslim states, and not the Government of Gambia.
In addition, he assured that the African country could not go to the ICJ to judge this case given the “reservations” on the part of Burma before article VIII of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Burmese authorities have accused Gambia of “lacking legitimacy” to bring the case before the ICJ.
In this sense, he had pointed out that the court lacks jurisdiction since the parties in question have not had any dispute within the framework of the aforementioned convention to date.
Thus, the court has rejected all the preliminary objections presented and has resolved the issue practically unanimously, with fifteen votes in favor and one against. The court considers that it has jurisdiction based on Article IX of the Convention and that it has the necessary powers to address the case.
The Gambian authorities have been quick to applaud the ICJ move, calling it a “great victory” in the fight to achieve “justice” for the Rohingya.
“This ruling is a milestone and paves the way for this case to move forward,” Gambia’s Ministry of Justice said in a message posted on its Twitter account.
The Gambia has become the first country to denounce another without a direct relationship to the alleged crimes under the Genocide Convention. The step, the result of the personal involvement of former Minister of Justice Abubacarr Tambadou after visiting the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and his experience working at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for the genocide in the African country, has with the support of a large number of member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
Given that the case could drag on for years, Gambia already asked the ICJ in 2019 to adopt precautionary measures with “extreme urgency” in order to “protect the rights of the Rohingyas”.
Proving that genocide has been committed is not easy and so far only three cases have been recognized since the Second World War: the one perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the late 1970s; that of nearly a million moderate Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994; and that of the 8,000 Muslim men and boys murdered in Srebrenica, in Bosnia, in 1995. Precisely, the ICJ already ruled in 2017 on this last case, ruling that Serbia did not comply with its obligation to prevent the genocide.
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