Genocide: Crime Against Humanity

Genocide is assumed by most to be the severest crime against humanity it is likely to commit. It is the mass annihilation of aentire group of people, an effort to wipe them out of existence. The term ‘genocide’ was created in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish legal scholar, in the book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe to describe Nazi operations to annihilate the Jews, gypsies, and other ethnic groups during the Holocaust. Genocide is consequent from the Greek genos, which means race or tribe, and the Latin ‘cide’, which means killing. Acts of genocide have been committed throughout history even before the word was created. In earliest times, it was common exercise for defeaters in warfare to massacre the men of a population they dominated.

The tribunal charged and tried Nazi officials for “crimes against humanity,” which included oppression on racial, religious or political grounds as well as cruel acts committed against non-combatants. After the Nuremburg hearingsexposed the terribledegree of Nazi crimes, the U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution in 1946 making the crime of genocide indictable under international law. In 1948, the U.N. accepted its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), where genocide is defined as any acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This encompassedmurdering or causing grave bodily or mental harm to members of the group, imposingcircumstances of life anticipated to bring about the group’s death, imposing actions intended to avert births or by forceeliminating the group’s children. Genocide’s “intent to destroy” isolates it from other crimes of humanity such as ethnic cleansing, which targets to forcibly expel a group from an

The U.N. Security Council, in 1993, established the International Criminal Tribunal for the previous Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, in the Netherlands; it was the first international tribunal since Nuremburg and the first to have aorder to indict the crime of genocide. Members of the Hutu majority in Rwanda murdered some 500,000 to 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority, with horrifying brutality and speed from April to mid-July 1994. As with the previous Yugoslavia, the international community did little to halt the crimes while they were happening, but that fall the U.N. extended the command of the ICTY to include the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), located in Tanzania. The Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals aidedto elucidateprecisely what sorts of acts could be categorized as genocidal, as well as how criminal responsibility for these act should be recognized. The ICTR set the important precedent that systematic rape is in fact a crime of genocide In 1998 where it also handed down the first sentence for genocide after a hearing, that of the mayor of the Rwandan town of