Who is genocide

The International Court of Justice ICJ has repeatedly stated that the Convention embodies principles that are part of general customary international law. This means that whether or not States have ratified the Genocide Convention, they are all bound as a matter of law by the principle that genocide is a crime prohibited under international law.

The ICJ has also stated that the prohibition of genocide is a peremptory norm of international law or ius cogens and consequently, no derogation from it is allowed. The definition of the crime of genocide as contained in Article II of the Genocide Convention was the result of a negotiating process and reflects the compromise reached among United Nations Member States in at the time of drafting the Convention.

Genocide is defined in the same terms as in the Genocide Convention in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Article 6 , as well as in the statutes of other international and hybrid jurisdictions. Many States have also criminalized genocide in their domestic law; others have yet to do so. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:.

The Genocide Convention establishes in Article I that the crime of genocide may take place in the context of an armed conflict, international or non-international, but also in the context of a peaceful situation. Michael Ignatieff, former director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, has agreed, arguing that the term has come to be used as a "validation of every kind of victimhood". The differences over how genocide should be defined have also led to disagreements on how many genocides occurred during the 20th Century.

Some say there was only one genocide in the last century: the Holocaust. Others say there have been at least three genocides as defined by the terms of the UN convention:. And in recent years, other cases have been added to the list by some. Other cases include the Soviet man-made famine of Ukraine , the Indonesian invasion of East Timor , and the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia in the s, during which an estimated 1.

There is disagreement over the fact that many of the victims of the Khmer Rouge were targeted because of their political or social status - putting them outside of the UN definition of genocide. The International Criminal Court in issued an arrest warrant for the President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, on genocide charges, accusing him of waging a campaign against the citizens of the Sudanese region of Darfur where about , people are said to have died and millions more displaced during seven years of fighting.

IS was "genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology and by actions, in what it says, what it believes and what it does," then-Secretary of State John Kerry said. In , The Gambia submitted a case to the International Court of Justice accusing Myanmar of carrying out a genocide against the Rohingya people, alleging "widespread and systematic clearance operations" in Rohingya villages.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people have fled Myanmar into bordering Bangladesh and elsewhere, and thousands are reported to have been killed. In , the US, Canadian and Dutch governments all formerly accused China of committing a genocide against the Uighur people in Xinjiang, while several other countries brought parliamentary resolutions making the same accusation.

Evidence suggests China has subjected the Uighurs to forced sterilisation , forced labour , mass detention , and systematic rape and torture - actions which many say meet the criteria of a genocide. China denies the charges. The first case to put into practice the convention on genocide was that of Jean Paul Akayesu, the Hutu mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba at the time of the killings.

In a landmark ruling, a special international tribunal convicted Akayesu of genocide and crimes against humanity on 2 September More than 85 people were subsequently convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, 29 on counts of genocide. In August , a leaked UN report alleged that Rwandan Hutus, perpetrators of the genocide, may themselves have been victims of the same crime.

Krstic appealed against his conviction, arguing that the 8, people killed constituted "too insignificant" a number to be a genocide. However, in the following days, the group was tracked and split up at several points along the journey by Serb forces, who killed those that they captured.

In their weakened state from months of poor living conditions, few successfully reached their destination. In the morning of the 12 July, the Serbs approached the UN base at Potocari, where most of the Bosnian Muslim refugees from the city were sheltering.

The Serbs informed the Dutch UN forces and civilian refugees that buses would take them safely to Bosnian Muslim territory, with women, the elderly and children leaving first.

The group were informed that the remaining men and teenage boys would be held behind to be questioned, in case they were in fact Bosnian Muslim soldiers. Following this announcement, approximately men and boys were separated from the women and elderly and sent to Bratunac. On 14 July, these men were systematically murdered by their Bosnian Serb captors and buried in mass graves. In total, when combined with the number of men and boys killed when attempting to flee to Tuzla through the forest, it is estimated that between and Bosniak Muslim men and boys were murdered.

The Bosnian War ended in November following peace negotiations, which agreed that Bosnia and Herzegovina was officially an independent state, made up of two different federal entities, the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska a Bosnian Serb Republic in which Srebrenica is now located.

In , the International Court of Justice ruled that the Srebrenica Massacre was an act of genocide. Brian Steidle is a former marine who became a patrol leader in Sudan for the Jount Military Mission monitoring the ceasefire between North and South Sudan. During his time in Sudan, he took photographs which evidence the devastation in the country. It began in Sudan is an ethnically diverse country that, at the start of the genocide, was controlled by an Arab dictatorship in the capital Khartoum.

In the years leading up to the genocide, tension in the Darfur region escalated over disputes about land and unequal power, and people in Darfur felt marginalised and ignored by the government, which concentrated its efforts and resources on the capital city and surrounding areas. In , in an attempt to secure more autonomy over their lives, some of the local inhabitants of the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit groups in Darfur joined forces create the Sudan Liberation Army SLA , which launched an attack on a military airbase in April In response, the Sudanese government armed and trained local inhabitants in the area to create violent, semi-professional militias known as the Janjaweed, who were instructed to carry out a series of attacks against Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit villages.

The devastating attacks, which followed on from government bombing of the villages, intended to diminish any support for the SLA and JEM and secure Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit lands and resources for the government. Between and thousands of villages were destroyed, and their inhabitants were raped, attacked and murdered. Those that survived the initial attacks were displaced, and attempted to survive in the desert where the government obstructed aid, food and water supplies or fled across the border to Chad.

In total, over , people were murdered, and approximately 2. Since , the Janjaweed, supported by the government, have continued to target black Africans in the Darfur region, and this persecution continues today, with approximately 2. In , the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir was charged by the International Criminal Court with three counts of genocide.

Image shows a copy of the Editorship Law. On 3 October , shortly after its defeat, France introduced its first antisemitic law under occupation - the Statut de Juifs. Section: What was the Holocaust? What was the Holocaust? Life before the Holocaust Antisemitism How did the Nazis rise to power? Life in Nazi-controlled Europe What were the ghettos and camps?

How and why did the Holocaust happen? Resistance, responses and collaboration Survival and legacy Resources Educational Resources Timeline Survivor testimonies About us How to use this site. Advanced content hidden Showing advanced content. Various different acts are defined in the convention as acts of genocide, including: Killing members of a 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. Symbolisation — Forcing groups to wear or be associated with symbols which identify them as different. Discrimination — Excluding groups from participating in civil society, such as by excluding them from voting or certain places.

In Nazi Germany, for example, Jews were not allowed to sit on certain park benches. Dehumanisation — To deny the humanity of one group, and associate them with animals or diseases in order to belittle them.

Organisation — Training police or army units and providing them with weapons and knowledge in order to persecute a group in future.

Polarisation — Using propaganda to polarise society, create distance and exclude a group further. Preparation — Planning of mass murder and identifying specific victims. Persecution — Incarcerating groups in ghettos or concentration camps , forcibly displacing groups, expropriating property, belongings or wealth. Extermination — Committing mass murder. Denial — Denial of any crimes. This does not necessarily mean denying that the acts of murder happened, but denying that these acts were a crime, and were in fact justified.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons [Public Domain]. Uprising In January , the Herero population, led by Chief Samuel Maharero, carried out a large armed rebellion against the oppressive German colonial rule. Genocide On 11 August , Trotha abandoned negotiations for a surrender and attempted an aggressive encirclement tactic, surrounding the Herero at the Battle of Waterberg and killing between 3, — 5, Herero combatants.

An map of the Ottoman Empire territories. Background The Armenians were a primarily Christian ethnic group who had lived in Eastern Anatolia modern day Eastern Turkey for centuries.