Category World News

The Gambia’s landmark case, accusing Myanmar of committing genocide against its mostly Muslim Rohingya minority, began in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) this week.

The Gambia’s attorney general and justice minister, Dawda A Jallow, told ICJ judges on Monday that the Rohingya were “targeted for destruction” by Myanmar’s government, as the case’s final hearing opened nearly a decade after the country’s military launched an offensive that forced some 750,000 Rohingya from their homes, mostly into neighbouring Bangladesh. The refugees recounted mass killings, rape and arson attacks.

The case marks the first time allegations of mass violations and abuses against the Rohingya are being heard at an international court. It is also the first time the ICJ will decide on a genocide case brought by a third country in defence of another nation or group.

In an unusual and moving gesture, Jallow asked Rohingya refugees present at the top court’s Peace Hall to stand and be acknowledged by the 15-man panel of judges.

The refugees are expected to testify in closed sessions, but it is not yet known when the court will provide a final ruling. The ICJ cannot enforce its rulings but its decisions carry legal weight.

Experts say the court’s decision in the Rohingya case could have implications for the widely followed South Africa genocide case against Israel, which was filed in the court on behalf of Palestinians in December 2023. That case has since been joined by several other countries.

Here’s what we know about why The Gambia is fighting for the Rohingya:

Why is The Gambia suing Myanmar?

The Gambia sued Myanmar in November 2019, accusing the Southeast Asian country of committing genocide against the Rohingya in breach of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

As a Muslim-majority country, the small West African nation of 2.5 million people brought the case on behalf of the 57-member Organisation for Islamic Cooperation, of which it is an active member.

The move catapulted the country and the case’s mastermind, former Attorney General Abubacarr Tambadou, into the global spotlight. Tambadou has since taken a position at the United Nations – he is the Registrar of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, an international court founded by the United Nations Security Council. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021.

Seven countries – Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, the Maldives, France and Britain – have since successfully applied to support The Gambia’s case at the ICJ.

Rohingya people in Myanmar were subjected to violent, months-long offensives by Myanmar’s armed forces, known as the Tatmadaw, from late 2016. Although the group had long faced persecution in Myanmar, according to rights groups, the attacks escalated sharply, as Rohingya communities were targeted in cases of arson, mass shootings, rapes and kidnappings.

In 2019 – the year The Gambia lodged its case with the ICJ – a United Nations fact-finding mission reported that about 10,000 people had been killed, and 730,000 people displaced to refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh. The military offensive showed “genocidal intent” and the government aimed to “erase” Rohingya identity and remove them from Myanmar, the United Nations mission found.

The Gambia may have been inspired to take up the case due to its own long history of repression under former dictator Yahya Jammeh, who ruled the country with an iron fist for 22 years until 2017, Imran Darboe, a barrister formerly with the Gambian justice ministry, told Al Jazeera.

Jammeh was forced out of office in 2017 by a regional military mission when he failed to leave office after losing the presidential elections.

In 2018, the new government began investigating Jammeh-era atrocities perpetrated by his “killer squad” security forces, including widespread abductions and killings.

Gambians were collectively reckoning with the painful testimonies of scores of victims as the Rohingya crisis unfolded, prompting the government to take action, despite a lack of precedent at the ICJ at the time.

“At that point, we were also going through our truth-and-reconciliation commission, and realising the value of protecting human rights,” Darboe said.

“Most people [in The Gambia] were shocked by what was being revealed, so there was the thinking that if the concept of human rights is universal, we cannot just focus on our own issues. We feel what the Rohingya people were feeling … we were all on the same page about that.”

The Gambia’s active role in the OIC also likely played a large role, Darboe added. While bringing an ICJ case would be expensive for the small nation, the OIC’s backing likely alleviates financial pressures, he said.

What is The Gambia’s argument at the ICJ?

Dawda, The Gambia’s justice minister, told the ICJ judges in his opening arguments on Monday that the Rohingya had been “deliberately targeted” by Myanmar’s ruling military and that their lives had been turned upside down.

“They have been targeted for destruction,” he said.

“Myanmar has denied them their dream, in fact it turned their lives into a nightmare, subjecting them to the most horrific violence and destruction one could imagine.”

Paul Reichler, another lawyer on the Gambian team, read out extensive witness testimony from 2017, describing scenes of houses being set ablaze with people in them, gang rapes and arbitrary killings.

The Myanmar government, Reichler added, had called the Rohingya an “impure and subhuman race” that threatened the local population.

A third team member, Phillipe Sand, concluded that the scale of the violence showed “Myanmar acted in this case with genocidal intent”.

What has Myanmar argued?

Myanmar’s defence team, led by the minister of international cooperation, Ko Ko Hlaing, will begin its response to the allegations on Friday, January 16, continuing until January 20.

In 2019, when the case was filed, Myanmar was under civil rule. In preliminary hearings for the case in December that year, Myanmar denied the allegations. Former leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, who was overthrown in a military coup in 2021, personally appeared at the court and called The Gambia’s claims “incomplete and misleading”.

In January 2020, the ICJ ordered Myanmar to take emergency measures to prevent a genocide of Rohingya, in what experts called a “stunning rebuke” of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Myanmar’s government – now under the control of the military, which is also grappling with an ongoing rebellion – continues to reject genocide and ethnic cleansing allegations, and says it was targeting Rohingya armed groups in “clearance operations”.

Who are the Rohingya?

The Rohingya are a largely Muslim ethnic group based primarily in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State, which sits on the border with Bangladesh.

Until their forced displacement in 2017, there were about one million Rohingya in Myanmar, making them an ethnic minority among Myanmar’s 137 ethnic groups. Other Rohingya populations live in India, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Although Rohingya identify as Indigenous to Myanmar, the government does not recognise them and maintains they are “illegal migrants” from Bangladesh.

Rohingya have long complained of state-sanctioned attacks and general discrimination – they are not granted citizenship and laws severely restrict their movement. Several armed groups have emerged, calling for an independent Arakan state, a historical name for Rakhine state and reminiscent of the vanished Arakan Empire which existed in the same area between the fourth and 13th centuries.

In October 2016, violent attacks on Rohingya people escalated sharply when the government launched attacks it said were targeting the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), an armed group formed in 2013.

At least 750,000 Rohingya fled, primarily to Bangladesh, but also to India, Thailand and Malaysia.

Survivors have recounted horror stories of security officials torching their communities, wounding, killing and torturing people – including children – by throwing them into fires.

Many fled across land through dangerous forests, while others crossed the Bay of Bengal on perilous boat journeys, which have resulted in an unknown number of deaths.

By 2025, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were living in squalid, packed tent camps in Bangladesh’s Cox Bazar.

Most are reliant on humanitarian aid. Recent cuts in foreign aid funding by the United States government have badly hit missions serving these communities, rights groups say, with reduced food rations and the closure of schools for children.

Some have attempted to leave the camp by boat journeys for other countries. In May 2025, the UN reported that two boats carrying 427 Rohingya fleeing Bangladesh and Rakhine state capsized at sea, in just one example.

The bodies of 32 Cuban soldiers killed during the US bombing of Venezuela have been returned to Cuba. Former Cuban President Raul Castro stood in a guard of honour.

Four weeks after shopkeepers in Tehran’s grand bazaar shut their stores in protest over the tanking economy, much of Iran is under an internet blackout as protests, which swelled to mass demonstrations against Iran’s clerical rule, have quietened.

The hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets in the wake of the shopkeepers’ protest are now reported to be staying at home following the deaths and detention of many protesters.

Iran’s government has not released an official death toll, and estimates about how many people have died in the protests vary. But the widely-cited United States-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) put the death toll at 2,615 on Wednesday this week. Iran’s government claims numbers have been vastly exaggerated.

Tensions with the US escalated this week when President Donald Trump threatened to take action if killings continued, but then appeared to back down on Wednesday night when he said he had received assurances from Tehran that the killings would stop and executions of detained protesters would not take place.

But while protesters may have been silenced for now, their concerns remain far from resolved. The threat of intervention by the US remains very real, and, critically, the dire economic conditions that first prompted protest in the closing days of 2025 have only worsened.

Why have protests erupted over the economy?

“The recent unrest was undoubtedly rooted in economic distress,” Hassan Hakimian, emeritus professor of economics at SOAS, told Al Jazeera. “Decades of chronic corruption and extensive economic mismanagement were accentuated by international economic sanctions, adding to the misery of large swaths of ordinary people.”

On top of this, Hakimian said, Iran has suffered severe environmental-related problems in recent months – “critical water shortages, power outages and crippling air pollution – generating a perfect economic storm”.

The value of the Iranian rial, whose near collapse on December 28, when it fell to a record low against the dollar, first prompted the protest, remains at a low.

Banking ATMs are offline, flights and currency transactions remain limited, casualties of the shutdown of the National Information Network, Iran’s state-controlled domestic intranet, which is essentially the country’s internet.

“If you think of the shutdown as having run for around a month, then we can fairly say that Iran’s economy has run at around 50 percent capacity over that period,” Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an economics professor at Virginia Tech, said. “Assuming that’s correct, you’re looking at a loss of around a tenth of the country’s GDP if that extends to a month. How much that is in dollars depends on what currency conversion you use. They change all the time, but, over a year, it’s likely somewhere between $20bn and $90bn.”

How have sanctions affected the Iranian economy?

Iran’s economy today is unrecognisable from that at the time of the 1979 Islamic revolution, as war, sanctions and shifting economic priorities have slowed it to a crawl, experts say.

One of the main reasons is that Iran is one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world.

Economic sanctions on Iran, beginning with those imposed by the US in the immediate wake of the revolution, followed by further tranches imposed by the United Nations over its nuclear programme in 2006, have played a central role in tilting Iran’s economy to the point of collapse. Israel’s attack in June last year, which resulted in a 12-day war between the two countries, further undermined confidence.

The US first imposed sanctions on Iran in 1979, when the Islamic revolution overthrew the shah, or monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose forces notoriously used repression and torture to keep him in power, without a democratic mandate.

In 1979, Washington also halted oil imports from Iran and froze $12bn in Iranian assets.

In 1995, then-President Bill Clinton issued executive orders preventing US companies from investing in Iranian oil and gas and trading with Iran. A year later, the US Congress passed a law requiring that the US government impose sanctions on foreign firms investing more than $20m a year in Iran’s energy sector.

In December 2006, the United Nations Security Council imposed its own sanctions on Iran’s trade in nuclear-energy-related materials and technology and froze the assets of individuals and companies involved in activities pertaining to it.

In subsequent years, the UN toughened sanctions and the European Union also followed suit.

In 2015, Iran signed a nuclear deal – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – with the US, United Kingdom, China, France, Germany, Russia and the EU. Under that pact, Iran agreed to refrain from any uranium enrichment and research into it for 15 years.

But in 2018, during his first term as president, Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the nuclear treaty and reimposed all sanctions on Iran.

In 2019, the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a “foreign terrorist organization”. Additionally, Trump imposed sanctions targeting petrochemicals, metals (steel, aluminium, copper), as well as senior Iranian officials.

On January 3, 2020, after the US assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC’s elite Quds Force, in a drone strike in Baghdad, Iraq, it also imposed more sanctions on Iran.

In September 2025, the UN’s sanctions were reimposed on Iran over its nuclear programme when the UNSC voted against permanently lifting economic sanctions on Iran.

Currently, under US and other international sanctions, nearly all of Iran’s oil revenues remain frozen. Additionally, assets held overseas are frozen, trade is restricted, and banks have been targeted.

Financial networks and companies linked to the development of Iran’s nuclear, ballistic-missile network and entities, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which many in the international community hold responsible for domestic repression, are also sanctioned and are not permitted to do business with the US or other nations levying sanctions.

Now, China buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s shipped oil, data for 2025 from analytics firm Kpler shows. Much of it is transported by a “shadow fleet” of oil tankers which fly false flags or switch off tracking devices to avoid sanctions.

How has this affected people in Iran?

Even before the conflict with Israel last year, many economists regarded Iran’s economy as locked in a period of “stagflation”, as sluggish growth – estimated by the International Monetary Fund at just 0.6 percent per year – combined with soaring prices, robbed many in Iran of their last hopes for a stable future for themselves and their families.

Economists generally consider an annual economic growth rate of 2 to 3 percent to be ideal.

Over the past eight years, Iranians’ purchasing power – the value of the money they have to spend, compared with prices – has fallen by more than 90 percent. Food prices have soared by an average of 72 percent compared with last year, as the rial has collapsed against the US dollar, official statistics show.

In December 2025, one US dollar was priced at about 1.36 million rial in the open market, the rial’s worst rate ever.

Then, in early January, as protests were in full swing, the Iranian rial dropped even further to 1.42 million against the US dollar – a 56 percent drop in value in just six months and a sharp decline from about 700,000 in January 2025.

Meanwhile, nearly one in five young people is out of work.

Why is the rial exchange rate important?

“One of the key economic indicators that really matters to people is the exchange rate,” Iranian American economist Nader Habibi explained. “People pay real attention to where the dollar is against the rial and, as their uncertainty grows, so does the amount of hard currency they store, such as dollars or gold.”

According to Habibi, shortages in the supply of hard currency following Israel’s attack in June last year, as well as competition for funds from a government scrambling to rebuild and maintain its defences after 12 days of war, sent confidence in the Iranian economy reeling and accelerated the collapse of the rial.

“The rapid devaluation of the rial was more than even conservative elements of society, such as the Bazaaris, could cope with,” Habibi said, referring to the common name for the shopkeepers who work in the grand bazaar.

“Imagine you want to sell a TV. Say you sell it and the next day you need to buy another to replenish your inventory,” he explained. “Everything depends on the ability to buy a new TV at a price lower than that which you sold the last one for. However, after the rial collapsed, that was something the Bazaaris no longer felt they could do, so they shut their shops and took to the streets.”

What will happen now?

“The protests have calmed in the last two or three days because of the sheer number of people killed. That’s why people did not go out,” one Tehran resident, who did not wish to be named, told Al Jazeera.

However, people remain angry about the state of the economy, experts say. “The reality is that the regime has no quick fix to alleviate the dire situation it confronts this time. Even if it were to succeed in suppressing the protests by brute force, the underlying issues will not be going away,” Hakimian, the economics professor, said.

Outside intervention by the likes of the US is unlikely to help, he added.