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Perhaps more broadly applied than the legal definition is the academic one – something which changes subtly depending on who is defining it. Similarly, 13 years after atrocities took place in the Sudanese region of Darfur, criminal investigations continue but no official charges of genocide have been made under the convention. The widespread killing and displacement of Yazidi by IS and Rohingya in Myanmar are ongoing and recognised by the UN as a whole, but have yet to be officially recognised as genocides by some individual states. Now consider that only three have been legally recognised – and led to trials – under the convention: Rwanda in 1994, Bosnia (and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre), and Cambodia under the 1975-9 Pol Pot regime. Failure to defineĬonsider how many genocides have occurred since the 1948 convention and its ratification in 1951. Third, too few perpetrators are actually convicted of their crimes. Second, the international community fails to act effectively against genocides.

First, the very application of the term “genocide” is applied too slowly and cautiously when atrocities happen. But on December 9, 1948, the international community formally adopted a definition of genocide within the 1948 convention – essentially enshrining the message of “never again” in international law.īut questions over whether the convention has achieved what it set out to do focus on three key failings. Against the backdrop of the Holocaust, this had been, in the words of Winston Churchill, a “crime without a name” – at least officially. Jewish laywer and Polish refugee, Raphael Lemkin, coined the word “genocide” in 1943 to describe the killing and destruction of peoples, deriving the word from the Greek “genos” (people, tribe or race) and the Latin “cide” (killing). In the decade that followed, however, the much hoped-for reparations devolved into a corrupted process marked by diverted funds and misconduct that even the lawyers involved characterized as fraud, The Times found in an investigation that drew on newly unsealed case filings, other court documents, official records, and interviews.Seventy years after the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into force, its effectiveness is disputed. Finally, in an American courtroom, the genocide was treated as fact. Three Armenian American attorneys sued to collect life insurance policies on victims of the genocide, and came away with a pair of class-action settlements totaling $37.5 million. Then, in the mid-2000s, court cases in Los Angeles, home to one of the largest Armenian communities outside Armenia, delivered a measure of justice that history had long denied. Ignored by most of the world and denied by the Turkish government, the Armenian slaughter was considered for generations a “perfect genocide,” its victims forgotten, its perpetrators unpunished. Their bodies were thrown in pits, torched, eaten by dogs and picked over by vultures.īy many estimates, a million Armenians died in the Ottoman Empire between 19, one of the first genocides in a century that would be defined by mass killings.