IV.

Genocide and International Law

In 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) passed an act called the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, also known as the Genocide Convention. This act, which took effect in 1951, provided a legal definition of genocide and established genocide as a crime under international law. According to the Genocide Convention, any of the following actions, when committed with the intent to eliminate a particular national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, constitutes genocide: (1) killing members of the group, (2) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (3) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to kill, (4) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and (5) forcibly transferring children out of a group.

In the 1990s the UN began an effort to prosecute cases of genocide. In 1993 the UN established an international tribunal to investigate and prosecute people involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in the former Yugoslavia. In late 1994 the UN established a similar tribunal to investigate war crimes in Rwanda. These trials, the first international war crimes trials since those that followed World War II, were the first attempts to prosecute individuals under the Genocide Convention. In 1998 the Rwanda tribunal convicted three men, including former Rwandan prime minister Jean Kambanda, of genocide. The convictions marked the first time an international court found individuals guilty of the crime of genocide.

In 1998 UN delegates adopted a statute approving a permanent International Criminal Court to try individuals accused of genocide and other serious violations of international criminal law. The court came into being on July 1, 2002, after 60 countries ratified the statute. Headquartered in The Hague, The Netherlands, the court will replace ad hoc tribunals such as those created for the conflicts in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.