Protecting vulnerable people “is a question of our humanity, over and above anything else,” Abubacarr Tambadou says

That belief motivated Tambadou, as attorney general and justice minister of Gambia since early 2017, to set up an ongoing commission to investigate crimes allegedly linked to former President Yahya Jammeh. It has also led him to spend more than a decade prosecuting atrocities in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

And last November, it prompted him – on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation – to file a case with the International Court of Justice accusing Buddhist-majority Myanmar of attempting to commit genocide against its ethnic Rohingya Muslim population. 

The Asian country Friday filed its first court-mandated report on its government’s and military’s efforts to comply with emergency provisional measures to protect Rohingyas, preserve evidence of any crimes against them, and to facilitate their repatriation.

The 47-year-old Tambadou, speaking to VOA Sunday from his residence in Gambia’s capital, Banjul, called the filing “a positive development that Myanmar continues to engage with the court on this matter.” He said it demonstrates that the government “is acting as a responsible member of the international community.”