Rohingya at the Hague: Turning Point for International Justice

The case now unfolding at the International Court of Justice is not only about Myanmar. It is about the moral weather of the international system, and whether the promise made after 1945 still has meaning when confronted with raw power, strategic convenience, and deliberate cruelty.

Nearly a decade after Myanmar’s military unleashed what the United Nations described as a ‘textbook example of ethnic cleansing’, the world’s highest court is hearing the first full genocide case in more than ten years. The Gambia, a small West African state with no direct link to Southeast Asia, has stepped forward under the Genocide Convention to accuse Myanmar of attempting to destroy the Rohingya people as a group.

That fact alone is historically unsettling: a country of just over two million citizens invoking universal obligations against a state of 55 million, backed diplomatically by some of the world’s most powerful actors.

The evidence that brought the case to The Hague is grim and numerically overwhelming. During the 2016–17 ‘clearance operations’ in Rakhine State, Myanmar’s armed forces razed more than 350 villages, killed at least 6,000 Rohingya in a matter of weeks, and drove around 740,000 people across the border into Bangladesh. Today, more than 1.1 million Rohingya are crowded into the camps of Cox’s Bazar, creating the largest refugee settlement on earth.

These are not abstract figures. They represent a human displacement on a scale larger than many Australian cities, sustained for years with no credible pathway home.

What makes the Rohingya case especially confronting is not only the scale of violence, but its bureaucratic normality. The campaign unfolded under a civilian-led government that enjoyed enormous international goodwill. Aung San Suu Kyi personally defended the military before the ICJ in 2019, rejecting allegations of genocide and framing the violence as counter-terrorism. The collapse of Myanmar’s fragile democracy in 2021 did not change that narrative. The junta that now rules Naypyidaw continues to deny wrongdoing, even as conflict has spread across the country and Rakhine State has again descended into war.

Law Without Enforcement: What the ICJ Can and Cannot Do

The ICJ’s involvement matters because it addresses a structural failure in the global system. Criminal courts focus on individuals. Sanctions punish regimes selectively. Humanitarian responses treat symptoms. The Genocide Convention, by contrast, was designed to establish collective responsibility — the idea that genocide is a crime against all, and that any state may act to prevent or punish it.

In July 2022, the Court confirmed that principle by rejecting Myanmar’s attempt to dismiss The Gambia’s standing. It was a quiet but profound moment: sovereignty did not outweigh shared obligation.

The provisional measures issued by the Court in 2020 were equally significant. Myanmar was ordered, unanimously, to prevent genocidal acts, preserve evidence, and report regularly on compliance. Few ICJ rulings impose such ongoing duties. Even without enforcement power, the orders created a legal and moral record that cannot easily be erased. They also forced a question that now hangs over the proceedings: if a state ignores binding orders from the world’s highest court, what does that say about the durability of international law itself?

Geopolitics, Shielding, and the Limits of Regional Silence

The geopolitical context makes the answer uncomfortable. China has shielded Myanmar from binding action at the UN Security Council, prioritizing strategic access to the Indian Ocean and energy corridors over accountability. Russia has followed a similar line. ASEAN, constrained by its doctrine of non-interference, has produced statements, frameworks, and consensus documents, but no meaningful pressure. Human Rights Watch has described the regional response as a failure of imagination and courage.

By contrast, the Islamic world has played a decisive — if underappreciated — role. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation backed The Gambia’s case politically and financially, transforming diffuse outrage into a legal strategy. Bangladesh, hosting more than a million refugees at immense social and economic cost, has pressed relentlessly for accountability, warning that prolonged displacement risks radicalization and regional instability.

This is not rhetorical alarmism. The World Bank and multiple advisory bodies have documented the long-term security consequences of protracted refugee crises when justice and repatriation are indefinitely deferred.

The Rohingya case therefore exposes not just a failure of enforcement, but a regional governance gap — one that cannot be filled by courts alone and demands an Indo-Pacific mechanism capable of translating legal findings into protection, pressure, and consequence.

An Indo-Pacific Accountability & Protection Compact

What is now required is an Indo-Pacific Accountability & Protection Compact, a coalition-led rapid-response framework that brings together willing ASEAN members and like-minded partners around a small number of mutually reinforcing commitments. The aim would not be to displace existing institutions, but to ensure that legal findings and humanitarian imperatives are met with timely, coordinated action when established mechanisms stall or fracture.

One strand of the Compact would focus on legal continuity, supporting sustained and collective follow-through on provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice. Another would center on protection, through an emergency refugee-support facility that links immediate humanitarian assistance with durable pathways, including resettlement options, safe-return arrangements and secure legal documentation.

A third element would provide calibrated leverage, aligning reconstruction assistance with the verified implementation of safeguards for citizenship and non-discrimination. Taken together, these commitments would translate moral concern into practical effect — strengthening protection on the ground, reinforcing accountability, and encouraging institutional reform — recognizing that for communities already deprived of dignity, delay itself carries harm.

For ASEAN, Australia and the Islamic world alike, the Rohingya case exposes a shared unease at the fault line between principle and power. Canberra speaks the language of human dignity and has backed it with aid, diplomacy, and public condemnation, yet as a middle power anchored in a rules-based order, Australia knows that law survives only when breaches carry consequences. That anxiety reverberates across Southeast Asia, where ASEAN’s creed of non-interference has too often translated into moral paralysis, leaving regional credibility strained as atrocities unfolded within its own community.

At the same time, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation has stepped beyond rhetoric, transforming collective outrage into legal action through The Gambia’s case, reminding the world that genocide is not a regional inconvenience but a universal crime.

Together, these responses reveal a widening gap between acknowledgment and accountability: if a crime of this scale can be documented, litigated, and still absorbed without meaningful consequence, then the Indo-Pacific and the wider international system receive a dangerous message — that norms are negotiable, solidarity is selective, and justice bends when confronted by strategic weight.

Precedent, Memory, and the Future of Genocide Law

Comparisons are unavoidable. The ICJ’s 2007 judgment on Srebrenica found Serbia responsible for failing to prevent genocide, even while stopping short of attributing direct commission. That ruling reshaped international legal thinking about omission, complicity, and state responsibility. A similar finding in the Rohingya case would carry global implications, particularly as other genocide-related cases — from Gaza to Ukraine — test the Court’s authority and consistency.

There is also a deeper, quieter question beneath the legal arguments. The Rohingya were stripped of citizenship by a 1982 law that rendered them foreigners in their ancestral homeland. Statelessness preceded slaughter. Administrative exclusion laid the groundwork for mass violence. In an era when citizenship, borders, and identity are again weaponised across continents, the Rohingya story reads less like an anomaly and more like a warning.

Whatever the final judgment, the ICJ case has already altered the diplomatic landscape. It has been demonstrated that small states can activate global law. It has forced powerful countries to justify their silence. And it has given a persecuted people something long denied: recognition that what happened was not incidental, accidental, or misunderstood, but potentially criminal at the highest level.

For the Rohingya in the camps of Bangladesh, justice remains distant and abstract. But in the language of international relations, distance is not neutrality. The question now facing the international community — including Australia — is whether genocide is treated as a historical slogan, or as a living legal commitment.

The Court in The Hague can issue judgments. The world must decide whether they matter.

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