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Was Myanmar’s lawyer caught on tape calling crimes against Rohingya Muslims genocide?
- Canadian lawyer William Schabas appeared in a documentary in 2013 seemingly describing the crimes against the Rohingya genocide
- But this week he stood alongside Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi at the Hague and denied any such crime had taken place
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Canadian lawyer William Schabas, an international scholar on genocide, has been criticised by friend and foe for first researching crimes against the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar, and now defending the state accused of perpetrating them.
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Schabas helped research a report in 2010 on systematic attacks against the Rohingya, which concluded that they met the international threshold of crimes against humanity.
Three years later, in an Al Jazeera documentary, he was filmed saying: “Denying their history, denying the legitimacy of their right to live where they live, these are all warning signs that mean that it’s not frivolous to envisage the use of the word genocide.”
This week Schabas stood alongside Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi at the International Court of Justice in The Hague and denied genocide took place during a military campaign in 2017 in which thousands were killed and raped and hundreds of thousands displaced.
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“William Schabas is basically selling out the Rohingya for some Myanmar [government money]. Really the worst sort of behaviour, how totally immoral and two-faced,” Phil Robertson, Deputy Asia Director at Human Rights Watch said on Twitter on Thursday.
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