(Bloomberg) -- Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi will lead the legal team that will seek to contest an accusation of genocide at the International Court of Justice over the treatment of the nation's Rohingya Muslim minority.
“The State Counsellor, in her capacity as Union Minister for Foreign Affairs, will lead a team to The Hague, Netherlands, to defend the national interest of Myanmar at the ICJ,” a statement late Wednesday on the official Facebook page of the state counsellor's office showed.
More than 700,000 Rohingya fled across Myanmar's western border into Bangladesh at the onset of military attacks on Muslim villages in Rakhine state in 2017. Those operations were sparked by militant attacks on security personnel.
Myanmar's military repeatedly denied committing atrocities against the community, dodging accusations that include gang rapes, murder and torching whole villages.
The U.S. and the United Nations have described Myanmar's treatment of Rohingya Muslims as “ethnic cleansing.”
The genocide case was lodged at the International Court of Justice by Gambia on Nov. 11 and public hearings are due from Dec. 10.
To contact the reporter on this story: Sunil Jagtiani in Bangkok at sjagtiani@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sunil Jagtiani at sjagtiani@bloomberg.net, Caroline Alexander
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