In 2019 The Gambia instituted proceedings at the International Court of Justice alleging Myanmar breached the Genocide Convention in relation to the Rohingya. The Court ordered provisional measures in 2020 and in 2022 rejected Myanmar's preliminary objections to jurisdiction, allowing the case to proceed.

No. It has no Rohingya population, shares no border with Myanmar and has no economic interest there. The legal basis invoked is that of obligations owed to the international community as a whole — every state party to the convention has a legal interest in its observance, even without direct injury.

This library has recorded eighteen mechanisms producing statelessness and five remedies, and all five came from the state that caused the problem correcting itself. Across twenty articles, no external mechanism appeared that could compel a state to fix anything. The Gambia is the first appearance of such a mechanism.

There is no final judgment, the case has run for years, the Court has no force to execute its judgments, and conditions for Rohingya in camps in Bangladesh have not changed because of it. But three things have genuinely changed: a formal legal record now exists, established by an international court; the principle that an unconnected state has standing has been confirmed and is reusable; and it sets a precedent that producing large-scale statelessness is no longer diplomatically free.

The passport you buy is protected by that same body of international law. When the system has teeth, the value of every nationality rises — including the one you paid for. That is not abstract ethics but the infrastructure of the product itself.

From 1982 to 1989 The Gambia and Senegal formed a confederation with arrangements on defence, economics and currency. It dissolved in 1989 over disagreement about the depth of integration, but by agreement rather than war.

Yemen merged symmetrically on paper then had a civil war; Tanzania merged asymmetrically letting one side keep its own state and lasted sixty years; Cameroon merged then centralised and had conflict; Gambia–Senegal was a loose confederation with each retaining sovereignty and dissolved peacefully. The looser the union the easier it dissolves, but without bloodshed; the tighter, the harder to dissolve and the more violent when it does. For any long-term commitment, ask what the exit mechanism looks like, not only the entry conditions.

It is a strip less than fifty kilometres wide running along the Gambia River some four hundred kilometres inland, with its border lying almost entirely within Senegal. The shape results directly from British and French colonial division along a river.