The International Court of Justice is scheduled to hold public hearings on Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya Muslim minority from 12 to 29 January, according to a statement released on Friday. The hearings will address the merits of the case brought against Myanmar under the 1948 Genocide Convention and will include expert testimony as well as closed sessions with witnesses from the Rohingya community. The case concerns allegations that Myanmar’s military committed acts of genocide during operations in Rakhine State beginning in 2017.

Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim population has faced longstanding restrictions and violence in Rakhine State, and around one million people have fled to neighboring Bangladesh since 2017. A UN fact-finding mission concluded that the military campaign that year involved acts that could amount to genocide. The case before the ICJ was filed in 2019 by Gambia, a signatory to the Genocide Convention, with backing from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Gambia will present its arguments during the first week of the hearings, from 12 to 15 January.

Both Gambia and Myanmar are parties to the Genocide Convention, which gives the ICJ jurisdiction over the dispute. Eleven other states, including Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, have submitted declarations of intervention. The case is being examined under the convention’s definition of genocide, which includes killing members of a protected group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, or deliberately inflicting conditions intended to destroy the group in whole or in part. Since the convention entered into force, the ICJ has formally confirmed genocide in one case, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre during the war in the former Yugoslavia.