THE HAGUE (CN) — Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was told to "stop the genocide" of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims as she personally led her country's defense at the UN's top court on Tuesday.
“This is not a conventional one that this court is used to,” Abubacarr Tambadou, the Gambia Minister of Justice told the International Court of Justice, where Suu Kyi is defending her nation from charges of genocide.
Suu Kyi, whose silence about the plight of the Rohingya has tarnished her reputation as a human rights icon, sat through graphic accounts of murder and rape in the wood-paneled courtroom in The Hague.
Rights groups have criticized her decision to represent Myanmar at the International Court of Justice against accusations by the west African state of The Gambia that her nation has breached the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Around 740,000 Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh after a bloody crackdown by the Myanmar military in 2017 that UN investigators already have described as genocide.
"This is very much a dispute between Gambia and Myanmar," Gambian Justice Minister Abubacarr Tambadou told the judges of the court, which was set up in 1946 to resolve disputes between UN member states.
Protesters and supporters of Suy Kyi braved the cold on Tuesday to stand before the former place that houses the International Court of Justice. The groups were separated by a row of police officers to prevent conflicts.
Myanmar is in the third year of a bloody, scorched-earth campaign against the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group. Myanmar claims, tendentiously, that the Rohingya are not citizens, but illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, to which they have fled.
Myanmar denies that it is committing genocide, though a 2017 UN report found “widespread human rights violations against the Rohingya population.” Some 25,000 people are estimated to have died and more than half a million have been displaced.
The Gambia brought the complaint to The Hague-based court though The Gambia and Myanmar have little historical or political connection.
When asked after the hearing why The Gambia brought the complaint, Tambadou replied: “Why not The Gambia?”
Both countries are parties to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It provided a legal definition of genocide and requires participating countries to prevent and punish the crime against humanity.
“State parties to the convention could invoke the responsibility of another party,” Gambian attorney Pierre d’Argent told the court, in the only non-English presentation of the day. The French-speaking attorney is special counsel at Foley Hoag, the Boston-based law firm representing The Gambia.
Fifty-seven member states of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation are supporting the case.
Tambadou is a driving force behind the proceeding. He is a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the UN special court that prosecuted crimes committed during the 1994 genocide in the central African country.
“This is not right and the world cannot just stand by and watch this happen again,” he told reporters at a news conference in November.
The three-day hearing will address The Gambia’s request for provisional measures. Gambia says that before the ICJ has the opportunity to hear the case on the merits, it should order Myanmar to cease its actions against the Rohingya and ensure that evidence of genocide is preserved.