GENOCIDE

Genocide

Genocide

Introduction

During the twentieth century more than 170 million people were killed by their own government, which far exceeds the 35 million that perished in all of the interstate wars during the same century. Many scholars have spent significant time and effort developing statistical frameworks to help us understand these conflicts. While sophisticated models for intrastate conflicts are abundant, modelling for more specific types of national violence has been slower to follow. This is important particularly when trying to predict the onset of such conflicts, because different types of intrastate wars can have very different causes. Civil wars between competing tribal clans, for instance, intuitively seem to occur for different reasons than the violent oppression of political or ethnic groups by the ruling elite. While they undoubtedly have some common instigating factors, if they occur for different reasons the best-fit models should not be the same. The most egregious form of intrastate conflict, genocide, is thus far unfortunately one of the models to receive the least amount of attention in quantitative-based academic scholarship, perhaps in part because of the relatively small number of occurrences. Therefore, all the issues related to genocide will be discussed in detail.

Discussion

The signatories to the UN Convention have made an agreement to punish those responsible for committing genocide. As part of adopting the UN Convention, each nation had to add genocide as a criminal offense in their respective legal codes. From this, an international prohibition against genocide emerged rather quickly following passage of the UN Convention. Unfortunately, in most instances of genocide there is no punishment for the atrocity. Legal scholars have focused their research on three main issues in the prosecution and enforcement of genocide statutes, intent, sovereign immunity, and universal jurisdiction. The intent element of the UN Convention has caused some concern that it is too restrictive. The issue of sovereign immunity had to be dealt with before prosecutions were possible, and the claim of universal jurisdiction causes some concerns within the legal field. Another main concern related to the legal response to genocide is the concept of universal jurisdiction. The UN Convention says that génocidaires can be tried by any nation regardless of where the actual acts occurred. Universal jurisdiction is assumed for example, the International Criminal Tribunal for the genocide crimes in Yugoslavia sits in the Netherlands, and the ICT for the Rwandan genocide meets in Tanzania. Even though the Nuremberg trial and the International Criminal Tribunals are based on universal jurisdiction, there are still arguments raised against the practice (Eltringham, 2004, 157).

The term genocide was established around 60 years ago. It was created by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944. Lemkin formed the word genocide by combining the Greek word 'genos' meaning race or tribe and the Latin word 'cide' meaning killing. Once he coined the term 'genocide,' Lemkin went on to offer a complete and broad definition of the crime. For Lemkin, genocide is the annihilation of a national group. The killings may be directed at individuals, but the ...