Genocide Convention
The 1948 treaty that defined genocide as an international crime and obliged states to prevent and punish it
Overview
Adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 9, 1948 and in force from 1951, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was the first human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations. It grew from the work of the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word genocide in 1944. The convention defines genocide as specified acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Its prohibition is regarded as jus cogens. The International Court of Justice has applied it in cases including Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and The Gambia v. Myanmar.
Related Topics
Geneva Conventions
The four Geneva Conventions of 1949 protect the wounded and sick on land and at sea, prisoners of war, and civilians under occupat...
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Drafted after World War II by a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt and adopted in Paris in December 1948, the declaration set ...
Nuremberg Principles
The 1945 to 1946 trial of the major Nazi organizations affirmed that individuals, including heads of state, bear criminal responsi...
Rome Statute
Adopted in Rome in 1998 by 120 states and in force in 2002, the statute created the first permanent international criminal court w...