Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi faced calls for Myanmar to \u201cstop the genocide\u201d of Rohingya Muslims as she personally led her country\u2019s defence at the UN\u2019s top court on Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suu Kyi, whose silence about the plight of the Rohingya has tarnished her reputation as a rights icon, sat through graphic accounts of murder and rape in the wood-panelled courtroom in The Hague.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wearing traditional Burmese dress, the 74-year-old did not speak to waiting media after arriving at the court\u2019s turreted Peace Palace headquarters in a motorcade with a police escort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A group of some 50 pro-Rohingya protesters gathered outside the gates of the ICJ for the hearing, carrying banners saying: \u2018Say yes to Rohingya, justice delayed is justice denied\u201d and \u201cStop Burma military attack Rohingya.\u201d \u201cToday is the start for our right to justice,\u201d said Mohammed Harun, 49, who travelled from London for the hearings. \u201cIt\u2019s international justice day for Rohingya.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rights groups have criticised her decision to represent Myanmar at the International Court of Justice against accusations by the west African state of The Gambia that it has breached the 1948 Genocide Convention.Around 740,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh after a bloody crackdown by the Myanmar military in 2017 that UN investigators have already described as genocide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is very much a dispute between Gambia and Myanmar,\u201d Gambian Justice Minister Abubacarr Tambadou told the judges of the court, which was set up in 1946 to resolve disputes between UN member states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are not denying that the Rohingya people suffered, but we are denying, like Suu Kyi, that there was a genocide in Myanmar.\u201d Thousands of people have also turned out in Suu Kyi\u2019s support in Myanmar in recent weeks since she announced that she would personally lead the southeast Asian nation\u2019s case at the court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suu Kyi is set to speak in Myanmar\u2019s defence on Wednesday. She is expected to argue that Myanmar was conducting legitimate operations against Rohingya militants and that the ICJ has no jurisdiction in the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 74-year-old was once mentioned in the same breath as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, having won the Nobel in 1991 for her resistance to Myanmar\u2019s brutal junta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi faced calls for Myanmar to \u201cstop the genocide\u201d of Rohingya Muslims as she personally led her country\u2019s defence at the UN\u2019s top court on Tuesday. Suu Kyi, whose silence about the plight of the Rohingya has tarnished her reputation as a rights icon, sat through graphic accounts of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":76147,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76148,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76146\/revisions\/76148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}