If Rohingya disappear, what does justice mean?

There are signs of progress in international accountability. Legal proceedings in Argentina have produced arrest warrants for senior Myanmar military officials and others accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice is expected to issue a judgment in the case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar.

These developments matter. They challenge the assumption that powerful perpetrators can commit atrocities indefinitely without consequences.

But international justice faces a fundamental test. A courtroom victory cannot by itself rebuild destroyed villages, restore confiscated land or guarantee that refugees can safely cross the border and return home.

The distinction is crucial: legal accountability addresses responsibility for crimes, while political action determines whether those crimes can continue.

If governments allow new abuses to proceed while waiting for international judgments, justice risks becoming retrospective rather than preventative.

The danger of another cycle of impunity

The most consequential warning in the Rohingya crisis is perhaps not what happened in 2017, but what followed.

The military leaders accused of orchestrating the genocide have largely avoided meaningful punishment, while the Myanmar military has continued to face accusations of atrocities against other communities.

That creates a powerful lesson for armed groups operating in Rakhine and elsewhere: if international consequences remain limited, persecution can become a viable political strategy.

The emergence of allegations against the Arakan Army therefore presents the international community with a choice. It can treat the current abuses as another isolated episode in Myanmar’s long-running conflict, or recognise them as part of a broader pattern in which ethnic minorities repeatedly become targets as territorial control changes hands.

For the Rohingya, the consequences of getting that choice wrong are existential.

What justice would actually look like

The most important argument is that justice cannot be defined solely by what happens in The Hague, Buenos Aires or any other courtroom.

For a displaced Rohingya family, justice would mean being able to return to its village without fear. It would mean recovering land taken during years of persecution. It would mean citizenship and equal rights rather than permanent legal exclusion. It would mean children growing up with access to education and a future rather than spending their childhood in refugee camps.

In other words, justice requires the restoration of political belonging.

That is why international pressure remains essential. Accountability for the Myanmar military must continue, while credible allegations of abuses by the Arakan Army must also be investigated. Targeted sanctions, restrictions on weapons and other forms of pressure can be used to raise the cost of further abuses. At the same time, humanitarian assistance for Rohingya refugees must not be allowed to become another casualty of donor fatigue.

The international community also faces a more immediate responsibility: preventing the Rohingya from becoming permanently displaced.

Nine years after the 2017 atrocities, the danger is that history will be remembered as a completed genocide while its consequences continue to unfold. Villages disappear, land changes hands, children grow up in exile, and another generation becomes disconnected from its homeland.

That is why the question of justice is ultimately inseparable from the question of survival.

If the Rohingya are eventually denied the possibility of returning to Myanmar, justice will have arrived too late. A people cannot be fully protected by a verdict if they have already lost the home to which that verdict was supposed to give them a right to return.

By Aghakazim Guliyev