December 9, 1948: The World Outlaws Genocide
On December 9, 1948, the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention, the first treaty making genocide a crime under international law.
It took one stubborn lawyer to give the worst crime a name -- and then a law.
On December 9, 1948, in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It was the first human rights treaty the United Nations ever adopted -- and the first time in history that genocide was defined as a crime under international law.
The convention was, in large measure, the work of one man: Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who in 1944 had coined the very word "genocide" -- from the Greek genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin cide, meaning killing -- in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. He had watched the Nuremberg trials punish Nazi leaders for "crimes against humanity" and concluded it was not enough: the law had no word for the deliberate destruction of a people, and without the word, there could be no law against it.
What followed was one of the great one-man campaigns in diplomatic history. Lemkin lobbied the brand-new United Nations relentlessly -- drafting resolutions, buttonholing delegates, writing, calling, cajoling -- until in 1946 the General Assembly declared genocide an international crime, and then commissioned the treaty. The convention he helped draft defines genocide as any of five acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group: killing its members; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; inflicting conditions of life meant to destroy them; preventing births; or forcibly transferring children. It makes punishable not only genocide itself, but conspiracy, incitement, attempt, and complicity -- in war or in peace.
The convention's definition was deliberately narrow -- it protects national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups, but not political ones, a compromise Lemkin himself regretted. And for decades it was more promise than practice: the Cold War froze the machinery of international justice. But the law waited, and in the 1990s it finally spoke -- in the tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, where the word Lemkin coined was read aloud as a criminal charge.
The convention entered into force in January 1951. One day after its adoption, the Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- December 1948 was the week the world tried to write "never again" into law.
Lemkin's word is now part of every language, and his convention -- today joined by more than 150 nations -- underpins every modern tribunal for mass atrocities. He gave civilization a name for its darkest crime, and then made the world promise to punish it.
Photo: S\u00e9bastien HOSY, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
