Gambia accuses Myanmar of hiding genocide evidence as legal teams debate “numerical thresholds” for atrocity

Mizzima

In a pivotal moment during the merits hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 27 January 2026, The Gambia’s legal team delivered a sharp rebuttal to the Myanmar military’s defence, accusing the junta of deliberately destroying evidence to mask the true scale of the 2017 Rohingya genocide.

Lawyer Yasmin El-Amin argued that the widely cited figure of 10,000 deaths from the UN Fact-Finding Mission is a conservative underestimate, with some expert projections suggesting the actual death toll may be more than double that amount.

“The Gambia absolutely rejects the notion that there must be a specific threshold of deaths to constitute genocide. Last week, Mr. Sam Blom-Cooper, advocate for Myanmar, argued that 10,000 deaths are not enough to cause the destruction of an entire group and therefore does not constitute genocide. However, due to Myanmar’s destruction of evidence and refusal to cooperate with the international investigators, these 10,000 figures are likely a massive underestimate, some estimates suggest it could be more than twice that. Even setting this aside, The Gambia does not accept that there must be a certain number of deaths to constitute genocide as there is no numerical limit in the legal definition of the crime,” she argued.

She further told the judges that the loss of at least 10,000 lives during Myanmar’s military “clearance operations” amounted to human tragedies that qualify as genocidal acts under Article 2(a) of the Genocide Convention. She also contended that Myanmar had inflicted serious bodily and mental harm on the Rohingya through inhuman treatment, torture, rape, and sexual violence, in violation of Article 2(b).

“For example, the widespread sexual violence, including gang rape, not only destroyed the victims’ normal marital lives. It also shattered the ‘ability to have children’ and the ‘desire to have children’ – the lifeblood for the long-term survival of that ethnic group. This is a deliberate act to destroy the entire ethnic group. Moreover, there is substantial evidence of children, who represent the future of a people, being intentionally targeted. These acts clearly constitute severe suffering capable of leading to the destruction of the group,” Yasmin Al-Amin accused.

She told the judges that a defining aspect of the case is the mass displacement of the Rohingya from northern Rakhine State, where nearly the entire population more than 700,000 people, accounting for roughly two-thirds of Myanmar’s total Rohingya population was forced to flee to Bangladesh as a result of the military’s genocidal violence. They fled amidst the trauma of “death or flee” and the separation of families. These conditions fall under the “serious mental and physical harm” defined in Article 2(b).

“As Mr. Loewenstein submitted yesterday, the food shortages they faced along the way to Bangladesh, the constant danger of being killed and the appalling living conditions in the camps they are now in have destroyed their ability to start a normal life. All of this is driving this entire community to its ultimate extinction,” she said.

Additionally, Professor Philippe Sands, another lawyer for The Gambia, submitted that the court must decide based on concrete evidence whether the Myanmar military targeted a substantial part of the Rohingya group during its “clearance operations” and whether there was an intent to destroy the group in whole or in part.

“The first point is the scale of the targeting. Secondly, in measuring this ‘scale,’ the ‘nature of the group targeted’ is more critical than the specific death toll. I must emphasize that ‘genocide is not a numbers game.’ There is no magic number of deaths in law that transforms an ordinary crime into genocide,” she argued.

She told the judges that the core question is whether the targeted portion constitutes a substantial part of the entire ethnic group. While targeting a single house or individual might not be considered “substantial,” this case involves the targeting of tens of thousands of homes and over 800,000 people—a scale that serves as compelling evidence of the intent to commit the crime.