What is Genocide?

1. Defining
Genocide
Presentation created by Robert Martinez
Primary Content Sources: Wikipedia & The History Place
Images as Cited
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2. In 1944, the term genocide was coined by
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar
- from the Greek root yevos genos (birth, race,
kind); secondly from latin – cidium (cutting,
killing) via French – cide.
education.hmd.org.uk

3. In 1933, Lemkin wrote a proposal on the “crime
of barbarity” to be presented to the Legal
Council of the League of Nations in Madrid.
This was his first formal attempt at creating a
law against what he would later call genocide.
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4. Lemkin used as illustrations the experience of
mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman
government (Armenian Genocide) of its
Christian population during the First World War
and the renewed round of anti-Assyrian
persecution in Iraq.
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5. His proposal failed, and his work incurred the
disapproval of the Polish government, which
was at the time pursuing a policy of conciliation
with Nazi Germany.
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6. In 1944, the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace published Lemkin’s most important work,
entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. This book
included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in
countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the course
of World War II, along with the definition of the term
genocide (“the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic
group”).
thetimes.co.uk

7. Lemkin’s idea of genocide as an offense against
international law was widely accepted by the
international community and was one of the legal
bases of the Nuremberg Trials (the indictment of the
24 Nazi leaders), specifies in Count 3, that the
defendants “conducted deliberate and systematic
genocide – namely, the extermination of racial and
national groups…”
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8. In the wake of the Holocaust, Lemkin successfully
campaigned for the universal acceptance of
international laws defining and forbidding genocide.
In 1946, the first session of the United Nations
General Assembly adopted a resolution that
“affirmed” that genocide was a crime under
international law, but did not provide a legal
definition of the crime.
untreaty.un.org

9. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly
adopted the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which
legally defined the crime of genocide for the
first time.
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10. The CPPCG was adopted by the UN General Assembly
on December 9, 1948 and came into effect on January
12, 1951. It contains an internationally recognized
definition of genocide which was incorporated into
the national criminal legislation of many countries,
and was also adopted by the Rome Statue of the
International Criminal Court, the treaty that
established the International Criminal Court.
isurvived.org

11. The Convention defines genocide:
… 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;
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12. b) Causing serious bodily or mental
harm to members of the group;
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13. c) Deliberately inflicting on the group
conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
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14. d) Imposing measures intended to
prevent births within the group;
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15. e) Forcibly transferring children of the
group to another group.
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