Amal Clooney will represent the Maldives in seeking justice for Rohingya Muslims at the UN’s highest court, where Myanmar faces accusations of genocide, The Independent reports.
The Maldivian government has said it will join the Gambia in challenging Myanmar’s treatment of Rohingya people during an army crackdown in Rakhine state in 2017 that forced more than 700,000 people to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.
In a unanimous decision in January, the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague imposed emergency “provisional measures” on Myanmar, instructing it to prevent genocidal violence against its Rohingya minority and preserve any evidence of past crimes.
In a statement, Clooney, the human rights lawyer and barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London, said: “Accountability for genocide in Myanmar is long overdue and I look forward to working on this important effort to seek judicial remedies for Rohingya survivors.”
Clooney successfully represented former the Maldivian president Mohamed Nasheed and secured a UN decision that his 2015 jailing for 13 years was illegal.
She also represented Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who spent more than 500 days in prison in Myanmar convicted of breaking the colonial-era Official Secrets Act. The journalists had been working on a Reuters investigation into the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men in Rakhine state. They were freed in May 2019.
Myanmar is accused over mass murder, rape and destruction of communities during an army crackdown in 2017. A UN fact-finding mission declared that the violence had “genocidal intent.”
Amal Clooney r represented Armenia at the European Court of Human Rights in the Perincek v. Switzerland case.
