Genocide Politics and Policy: Conference Remarks

The conduct constituting genocide is repugnant, reprehensible in the highest degree, and, obviously, needs to be prevented or punished.Proceeding from that premise, we may now ask whether the specification of genocide as a separate crimea crime distinct from other crimes against humanityis good law or good policy.My conclusion is that it is neither good law nor good policythat, in fact, more is lost than is gained by emphasizing the distinction between genocide and crimes against humanity of other types.I come to this conclusion for two reasons.First, there is simply a lack of compelling moral or normative reasons to set genocide apart from other crimes against humanity.And second, there are substantial costs entailed in maintaining that legal distinction.After first situating genocide as a type of crime against humanity, I will then lay out the theoretical and practical reasons that cause me to conclude that it is not desirable to place genocide in a class by itself.Genocide is defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ("Genocide Convention") as: Any of the following acts, when 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; or, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.That definition has been incorporated into the statutes of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda 2