Canadian lawyer William Schabas, an international scholar on genocide, has been criticized by friend and foe for first researching crimes against Myanmar's Muslim Rohingya and now defending the state accused of perpetrating them.

Schabas helped research a report in 2010 on systematic attacks against the Rohingya. It concluded that they met the international threshold of crimes against humanity.

Three years later, in an Al Jazeera documentary, he was filmed saying, "Denying their history, denying the legitimacy of their right to live where they live, these are all warning signs that mean that it's not frivolous to envisage the use of the word genocide."