Genocide Convention

Genocide Convention

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Signed	9 December 1948
Location	Paris
Effective	12 January 1951
Signatories	41
Parties	147 (complete list)
Depositary	Secretary-General of the United Nations

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 as General Assembly Resolution 260. The convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. It defines genocide in legal terms, and is the culmination of years of campaigning by lawyer Raphael Lemkin. All participating countries are advised to prevent and punish actions of genocide in war and in peacetime. The number of states that have ratified the convention is currently 147.

Definition of genocide

Article 2 of the convention defines genocide as

...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2

Article 3 defines the crimes that can be punished under the convention:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

(d) Attempt to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide.

— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 3

Background

The convention was passed to outlaw actions similar to the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the Holocaust by Nazi Germany during World War II. Its first draft included political killings, but the USSR, along with some other nations, would not accept that actions against groups identified as holding similar political opinions or social status would constitute genocide, so these stipulations were subsequently removed in a political and diplomatic compromise. Genocide scholar William Schabas states: "Rigorous examination of the travaux fails to confirm a popular impression in the literature that the opposition to inclusion of political genocide was some Soviet machination. The Soviet views were also shared by a number of other States for whom it is difficult to establish any geographic or social common denominator: Lebanon, Sweden, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Egypt, Belgium, and Uruguay. The exclusion of political groups was in fact originally promoted by a non-governmental organization, the World Jewish Congress, and it corresponded to Raphael Lemkin's vision of the nature of the crime of genocide."

Parties

Main article: List of parties to the Genocide Convention

Participation in the Genocide Convention

  Signed and ratified

  Acceded or succeeded

  Only signed

Reservations

Sixteen nations conditioned ratification, accession, or succession to the Convention on one or more declarations, reservations, or understandings which explicitly require that the nation grant consent to trial of its citizenry before an international court for the crime of genocide.

The nations asserting such reservations are:

• Bahrain
• Bangladesh
• China
• India
• Malaysia (reservation opposed by the Netherlands and the United Kingdom)
• Morocco
• Myanmar
• Philippines (reservation opposed by Norway)
• Rwanda (reservation opposed by the United Kingdom)
• Singapore (reservation opposed by the Netherlands and the United Kingdom)
• United Arab Emirates
• United States (reservation opposed by Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom)
• Venezuela
• Vietnam (reservation opposed by the United Kingdom)
• Yemen (reservation opposed by the United Kingdom)
• Yugoslavia (now Montenegro and Serbia)

Application to Non-Self-Governing Territories

Any Contracting Party may at any time, by notification addressed to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, extend the application of the present Convention to all or any of the territories for the conduct of whose foreign relations that Contracting Party is responsible

— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 12

Several countries opposed this article, considering that the convention should apply to Non-Self-Governing Territories:

• Albania
• Belarus
• Bulgaria
• Hungary
• Mongolia
• Myanmar
• Poland
• Romania
• Russia
• Ukraine

The opposition of those countries were in turn opposed by:

• Australia
• Belgium
• Brazil
• Ecuador
• China
• Netherlands
• Sri Lanka
• United Kingdom

Breaches

Rwanda

The first time that the 1948 law was enforced occurred on 2 September 1998 when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a small town in Rwanda, guilty of nine counts of genocide. The lead prosecutor in this case was Pierre-Richard Prosper. Two days later, Jean Kambanda became the first head of government to be convicted of genocide.

Yugoslavia

The first state to be found in breach of the Genocide convention was Serbia. In the Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro case the International Court of Justice presented its judgment on 26 February 2007. It cleared Serbia of direct involvement in genocide during the Bosnian war, but ruled that Serbia did breach international law by failing to prevent the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, and for failing to try or transfer the persons accused of genocide to the ICTY, in order to comply with its obligations under Articles I and VI of the Genocide Convention, in particular in respect of General Ratko Mladić.

Accusations

United States

One of the first accusations of genocide submitted to the UN after the convention entered into force concerned treatment of black people in the United States. The Civil Rights Congress drafted a 237-page petition stating, among other things, that "the lynching and other forms of assault on the lives and livelihoods of African Americans from 1945 to 1951, especially the frenzied attacks on returning black American veterans, amounted to genocide." Black activists William Patterson, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois presented this petition to the UN in December 1951. Raphael Lemkin, originator of the term genocide, however, "argued vehemently that the provisions of the Genocide Convention bore no relation to the US Government or its position vis-à-vis Black citizens."

See also

• Armenian Genocide
• Command responsibility
• Human rights abuse
• International law
• International human rights law
• War crimes

Further reading

• Henham, Ralph J.; Chalfont, Paul; Behrens, Paul (Editors 2007). The criminal law of genocide: international, comparative and contextual aspects, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., ISBN 0-7546-4898-2, ISBN 978-0-7546-4898-7 p. 98
• Tams, Christian J.; Berster, Lars; Schiffbauer, Björn (2014). Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: A Commentary. C.H. Beck. ISBN 978-3-406-60317-4
• Introductory note by William Schabas and procedural history note on the Genocide Convention in the Historic Archives of the United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law