A legal concept defined in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
According to this Convention, "genocide means any of the following acts, committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
murder of members of the group;
serious injury to the physical or mental integrity of group members;
intentional subjection of the group to conditions of existence likely to lead to its total or partial physical destruction;
measures aimed at hindering births within the group;
forced transfer of children from the group to another group.
When and how did the term 'genocide' appear?
The term appears under the pen of the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in 1943.
Already marked by the mass assassinations of Armenians during the First World War, he wishes to forge a neologism, composed of the Greek genos for «race» and the Latin cide suffix meaning «kill», to describe the Nazi policies of systematic murder.
And today, what about it?
The 1948 Convention is today ratified by 153 States. Some of them have incorporated the crime of genocide into their domestic law, like France in 1994. Since 1948, two special international jurisdictions established under the auspices of the UN have pronounced convictions for genocide: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1994-2015) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1993-2017). Since 1998, the International Criminal Court has been the only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute those responsible for genocide.
Not every mass murder is...
Genocide: the definition adopted by the 1948 Convention is based on specific criteria as to the nature of the target group. Massacres committed on political and social criteria are thus excluded from this legal definition.
If someone tells me: "Contesting a mass murder as genocide is like reducing its severity."
I reply: No. The term "genocide" is a legal concept based on precise criteria and does not include a moral dimension. If, in fact, this term having acquired a strong symbolic significance is abusively used in order to mark the minds, the motivations that led to its creation were not to create a hierarchy between the crimes, but to establish the specificity of certain crimes in the field of law.
To go further...
The Memorial offers "Histoire(s) en série", a web series of 4 episodes for teachers and students. Built on a short format, it is based on archival documents, testimonies and a perspective proposed by experts.
