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7 - Developments relating to minorities in the law on genocide

from PART B - Non-minorities-specific instruments, provisions and institutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2009

By
William A. Schabas
Edited by
Kristin Henrard  and
Robert Dunbar
Kristin Henrard
Affiliation:
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
Robert Dunbar
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen
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Summary

Introduction

Raphael Lemkin first proposed the term ‘genocide’ in his seminal 1944 study on Nazi occupation policies. Lemkin's interest in the subject dated to his days as a student at Lvov University, when he intently followed attempts to prosecute the perpetrators of the massacres of the Armenians. Lemkin created the term ‘genocide’ from two words, genos, which means race, nation or tribe in ancient Greek, and caedere, meaning to kill in Latin. Lemkin suggested the following definition:

a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objective of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.

Lemkin called for the development of ‘provisions protecting minority groups from oppression because of their nationhood, religion, or race’. Noting that ‘genocide’ referred to the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group, he described it as ‘an old practice in its modern development’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Synergies in Minority Protection
European and International Law Perspectives
 , pp. 189 - 212
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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References

Lemkin, Raphael, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, 1944).Google Scholar
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Robinson, Jacob, And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight (New York: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 72–3.Google Scholar
Schabas, William A., Genocide in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Chalk, Frank and Jonassohn, Kurt, ‘The conceptual framework’, in Chalk, Frank and Jonassohn, Kurt (eds.), The History and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 3–43;Google Scholar
Jescheck, Hans-Heinrich, ‘Genocide’, in Bernhardt, Rudolph (ed.), Encyclopedia of Public International Law, Vol. II (Amsterdam: North-Holland Elsevier, 1995), p. 541.Google Scholar
‘Minutes of Conference Session of July 23, 1945’, in Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1949), p. 331.
Johnson, Larry D., ‘Ten Years Later: Reflections on the Drafting’ (2004) 2 Journal of International Criminal Justice368, 372.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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