Genocide

In 1946 the United Nations General Assembly first recognised the crime of genocide.

The crime was first codified -or described- in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocicde (the Genocide Convention). The Genocide Convention consists of principles that are part of customary international humanitarian law. This means that whether or not states have ratified the Genocide Convention, they are all bound it as a matter of law. All domestic penal courts and hybrid or international courts define genocide in the same terms as in the Genocide Convention.

Definition of the crime of genocide

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:

• 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