GENOCIDE AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

Is there a more potent word in the English language than ‘genocide’, the neologism invented by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin in the 1940s? Lemkin sought to encapsulate and criminalize an atrocious practice – the destruction of human groups – that had afflicted humanity since the dawn of recorded history, and probably long before. The power of the term that was first deployed in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Lemkin 1944) was evident in the United Nations’ decision, just four years later, to establish a convention to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. And its power is evident today in the cartwheels that leaders and other policy-makers will turn, in order to avoid having the word ‘genocide’ applied to their actions. Nonetheless, the ‘prohibition regime’ against genocide remains weakly developed and only sporadically effective. Efforts to suppress genocide, and bring perpetrators to justice, have until recently run up against the most powerful institution in international relations: state sovereignty, which long permitted despots to annihilate members of their own populations without outside interference.