LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Genocide: Genocide Convention
built 126 days ago
Genocide was both narrowed and expanded beyond its original racially based definition in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This international agreement was approved and proposed for signature and accession by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948, and entered into force on January 12, 1951. Article 2, the heart of the Convention, outlines the qualifications for deeming an act a "genocide":
Source:
Genocide is a particular type of mass violence perpetrated against a large population. Other threats to the survival of a population, such as arbitrary imprisonment, discrimination, mass and systematic rape, torture, cutting off essential civilian supplies, and forced migration, can perpetrate large-scale harm against that population and have many of the same implications for public health as overt genocide. However, since 1946, when the United Nations General Assembly declared that genocide is "a crime under international law," genocide is recognized as distinct from other forms of mass violence. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, enacted in 1951, defines genocide as:
Source:
Genocide involves death and dying, not of individuals but of entire groups. The issue is never a comparison of numbers, but rather the intent of perpetrators and consequences for the victim group. The United Nations Convention aspires to both prevent and punish genocide. Thus far, it has been unsuccessful in preventing genocide. Trials begun in the period after 1992 in the Hague and Arusha related to events in Bosnia and Rwanda bear witness to the success or failure of war crime tribunals. Genocide remains a threat wherever national and ethnic tensions run high, when preconditions such as Helen Fein and Ervin Staub have suggested appear and trigger the use of violence.
Source:
The term Genocide derives from the latin (genos=race,tribe; cide=killing) and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group" and cites the first usage of the term as R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (1944) p. 79: "By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group." The U.N. General Assembly adopted this term and defined it in 1946 as "...a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups." The U.N. Convention on Genocide (1948) was profoundly influenced by the Holocaust, citing that "[...]the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg has punished certain persons who committed 'similar acts' to those which the Convention aims at punishing."[1]
Source:
Since the passage of the Genocide Convention, numerous groups have sought recognition and redress by describing actions taken against them as genocidal. Because the terms of the convention can be interpreted strictly or broadly, there were a number of disputes over definitions, scale, and evidence. Native Americans have sought redress on the basis that the European settlement of the Americas led to death, displacement, and suffering, and that this outcome was the result of deliberate genocidal policies. A similar movement on behalf of aborigines recently gained momentum in Australia. Some Native American activists contend that genocidal policies have not ended, given the grim living conditions and poor health statistics on Native American reservations. Some African Americans seeking reparations for slavery invoke the Genocide Convention, which has no statute of limitations.
Source:
Genocide is a crime under international law, under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, when it enters into force. The Convention (in article 2) defines genocide as:
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Genocide Convention