Defining Genocide Presentation created by Robert Martinez Primary Content Sources: Wikipedia & The History Place Images as Cited worldpoliticsuncovered.wordpress.com

In 1944, the term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar - from the Greek root yevos genos (birth, race, kind); secondly from latin – cidium (cutting, killing) via French – cide. education.hmd.org.uk

In 1933, Lemkin wrote a proposal on the “crime of barbarity” to be presented to the Legal Council of the League of Nations in Madrid. This was his first formal attempt at creating a law against what he would later call genocide. jonestream.blogspot.com

Lemkin used as illustrations the experience of mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman government (Armenian Genocide) of its Christian population during the First World War and the renewed round of anti-Assyrian persecution in Iraq. thewanderlife.com

His proposal failed, and his work incurred the disapproval of the Polish government, which was at the time pursuing a policy of conciliation with Nazi Germany. retronaut.com

In 1944, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin’s most important work, entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. This book included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the course of World War II, along with the definition of the term genocide (“the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group”). thetimes.co.uk

Lemkin’s idea of genocide as an offense against international law was widely accepted by the international community and was one of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials (the indictment of the 24 Nazi leaders), specifies in Count 3, that the defendants “conducted deliberate and systematic genocide – namely, the extermination of racial and national groups…” metalonmetalblog.blogspot.com

In the wake of the Holocaust, Lemkin successfully campaigned for the universal acceptance of international laws defining and forbidding genocide. In 1946, the first session of the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution that “affirmed” that genocide was a crime under international law, but did not provide a legal definition of the crime. untreaty.un.org

In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which legally defined the crime of genocide for the first time. www.tumblr.com

The CPPCG was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 9, 1948 and came into effect on January 12, 1951. It contains an internationally recognized definition of genocide which was incorporated into the national criminal legislation of many countries, and was also adopted by the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court. isurvived.org

The Convention defines genocide: … any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: a) killing members of the group; reunionblackfamily.com

b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; www.tumblr.com

c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; oregonlive.com

d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; elyafiller.wordpress.com

e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. espressostalinist.wordpress.com