EuropaWorld 22/6/2001 The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted unanimously by the then 55 member states of the United Nations on 9 December 1948. The occasion was the 3rd UN General Assembly, meeting in Paris. The convention entered into force in 1951 once it had been ratified by twenty nations.

The Genocide Convention was the first ever UN human rights treaty; being signed 24 hours earlier than the more widely known Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, although 132 countries today are signatories to this convention, more than 50 other nations - including Indonesia, Japan and the United Arab Emirates - are not. The world's superpower, the United States, did not sign the Convention until 1988.

Drafted almost single-handed by Dr Raphael Lemkin (see Extraordinary Lives), the Genocide Convention confirms that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law. Signatories to the Convention are under a legal obligation to recognise genocide as a crime that they will undertake to prevent and to punish.

In the present Convention, genocide is defined as any of a series of acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. These include:

Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Ratifying nations are legally bound to punish those who commit this crime, whether they constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals. Genocide, attempts to commit genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and incitement to commit genocide are all punishable under the Convention. Prosecutions can take place in domestic courts or in international tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. Such tribunals are designed for the most serious international crimes.

The Convention originally remained in effect for a period of ten years and subsequently for successive periods of five years. If signatories wish to denounce the Convention, they must do so at least six months before the expiration of the current five-year period. If, as a result of denunciations, the number of parties to the Convention falls below sixteen, the Convention shall cease to be in force.

On September 9, 2000 Switzerland and Guinea became the 131st and the 132nd parties to the Genocide Convention.

More information on the Genocide Convention - including the full text in 20 languages - can be found at the Prevent Genocide website at http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/