The top United Nations court will on November 19 deliver a landmark ruling on whether Myanmar’s crackdown against its mostly Muslim Rohingya minority constituted a genocide , officials said on Tuesday (November 3, 2026).
Judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have for seven years been weighing accusations by The Gambia that Myanmar’s brutal repression of the Rohingya breached the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.
In a previous hearing in 2019, de facto civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi herself addressed the court, housed in the iconic Peace Palace in The Hague. In 2024, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, also based in The Hague, asked judges for an arrest warrant for Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing over alleged crimes against humanity. Legal experts are closely watching the decision from the ICJ, which rules in disputes between countries, for clues as to how the court might sway in the seminal genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel over its campaign in Gaza. The ICJ is not the only court looking into possible crimes against the Rohingya.
During hearings on the case in January, Gambian Justice Minister Dawda Jallow told the court the Rohingya had suffered “the most horrific violence and destruction one could imagine”. Myanmar retorted at the hearing that the allegations were “unsubstantiated”.
