Three years on, the Rohingya are still waiting for a justice that may never come

Three ongoing court cases are offering hope to the 1 million Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh’s squalid camps, but the system is confusing for everyone. Can frontline aid workers and international courts do more to temper refugees’ mismatched expectations, asks Verena Hölzl

Nearly 1 million Rohingya refugees still live in Bangladesh’s fragile settlements (AFP/Getty)

Nurul Alom’s mosque is a tarpaulin-covered bamboo shelter in the middle of Bangladesh’s sprawling refugee camps. As the imam for this part of the camps, he leads other refugees in a daily plea: “Every day in every prayer, we ask Allah for justice.”

Alom is among more than 700,000 Rohingya pushed from their homes in neighbouring Myanmar’s Rakhine State by a military purge in August 2017. Three years later, little has changed: nearly 1 million refugees live in Bangladesh’s fragile refugee settlements; Myanmar has stripped most Rohingya of basic rights and citizenship; and Myanmar authorities haven’t been held to account for what the Rohingya community believes is a genocide.

The wheels of international justice are turning, however. Three separate courts around the globe are examining atrocity crimes committed against the Rohingya. People in the camps follow the news eagerly – a December hearing in a case accusing Myanmar of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague saw people hovering over smartphones and crammed into camp teashops to follow the proceedings from afar.