What is Genocide?The term genocide was first coined in 1944 by Polish, Jewish refugee Raphael Lemkin to describe the Jewish Holocaust during World War II, as well as the mass murder of other groups by the Hitler regime. In Lemkin’s view, genocide is a premeditated crime with clearly defined goals, rather than just an aberration. Today genocide is often viewed as the systematic, intentional attempt by an authority to kill en masse the members of a socially defined category . Or as BBC put it in 2010 "the mass extermination of a whole group of people, an attempt to destroy an entire group and wipe them out of existence."
|
International Definition
However, the definition of genocide under international law has been the cause of some confusion and debate. The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), which was eventually ratified by 140 nations, including the U.S. in 1986. Genocide is defined in Articles II and III of the CPPCG, however this definition has come under fire from different angles. A common arguement is that the definition is too narrow and people have trouble applying it to different cases.
Articles II and III of the Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means 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.
Article III: The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide."