Genocide

The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944
in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos,
meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing, Lemkin
developed the term partly in response to the Nazi policies of systematic murder
of Jewish people during the Holocaust, but also in response to previous
instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular
groups of people. Later on, Raphäel Lemkin led the campaign to have genocide
recognised and codified as an international crime.
 Genocide was first recognised as a crime under
When did international law in 1946 by the United Nations
General Assembly (A/RES/96-I). It was codified as
Genocide an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
became a Genocide (the Genocide Convention). The
Convention has been ratified by 149 States (as of
Crime January 2018). The International Court of Justice
(ICJ) has repeatedly stated that the Convention
embodies principles that are part of general
customary international law. This means that
whether or not States have ratified the Genocide
Convention, they are all bound as a matter of law by
the principle that genocide is a crime prohibited
under international law. The ICJ has also stated that
the prohibition of genocide is a peremptory norm of
international law and consequently, no derogation
from it is allowed.
 Some say there was only one genocide in the last
century: the Holocaust.
Others say there have been at least three genocides as
defined by the terms of the 1948 UN convention:
The mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks
between 1915-1920, an accusation that the Turks deny
How many The Holocaust, during which more than six million
genocides Jews were killed
Rwanda, where an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and
have there moderate Hutus died in the 1994 genocide
And in recent years, other cases have been added to the
been? list by some. In Bosnia, the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica
has been ruled to be genocide by the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Other cases include the Soviet man-made famine of
Ukraine (1932-33), the Indonesian invasion of East
Timor (1975), and the Khmer Rouge killings in
Cambodia in the 1970s, during which an estimated 1.7
million Cambodians died by execution, starvation, or
forced labour.
 Genocide's “intent to destroy”
separates it from other crimes of
humanity such as ethnic cleansing,
which aims at forcibly expelling a
group from a geographic area (by
killing, forced deportation and
Conclusion other methods)
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