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Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal was an ad hoc court located in The Hague, Netherlands.
Universal jurisdiction is a legal principle that allows states or international organizations to claim criminal jurisdiction over an accused person regardless of where the alleged crime was committed, and regardless of the accused's nationality, country of residence, or any other relation to the prosecuting entity. Crimes prosecuted under universal jurisdiction are considered crimes against all, too serious to tolerate jurisdictional arbitrage. The concept of universal jurisdiction is therefore closely linked to the idea that some international norms are erga omnes, or owed to the entire world community, as well as to the concept of jus cogens – that certain international law obligations are binding on all states.
Crimes against humanity are widespread or systemic criminal acts which are committed by or on behalf of a de facto authority, usually by or on behalf of a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war. They are not isolated or sporadic events because they are part of a government policy or they are part of a widespread practice of atrocities which is tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority. They do not need to be part of an official policy, but they only need to be tolerated by authorities.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention, is an international treaty that criminalizes genocide and obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition. It was the first legal instrument to codify genocide as a crime, and the first human rights treaty unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, on 9 December 1948, during the third session of the United Nations General Assembly. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951 and has 152 state parties as of 2022.
Victor's justice is a term which is used in reference to a distorted application of justice to the defeated party by the victorious party after an armed conflict. Victor's justice generally involves the excessive or unjustified punishment of defeated parties and the light punishment of or clemency for offenses which have been committed by victors. Victors' justice can be used in reference to manifestations of a difference in rules which can amount to hypocrisy and revenge or retributive justice leading to injustice. Victors' justice may also refer to a misrepresentation of historical recording of the events and actions of the losing party throughout or preceding the conflict.
The Bosnian genocide refers to either the Srebrenica massacre or the wider crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing campaign throughout areas controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) during the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. The events in Srebrenica in 1995 included the killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, as well as the mass expulsion of another 25,000–30,000 Bosniak civilians by VRS units under the command of General Ratko Mladić.
Jean-Paul Akayesu is a former teacher, school inspector, and Republican Democratic Movement (MDR) politician from Rwanda, convicted of genocide for his role in inciting the Rwandan genocide.
Incitement to ethnic or racial hatred is a crime under the laws of several countries.
International criminal law (ICL) is a body of public international law designed to prohibit certain categories of conduct commonly viewed as serious atrocities and to make perpetrators of such conduct criminally accountable for their perpetration. The core crimes under international law are genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi Germany perpetrated the Holocaust: a large-scale genocidal campaign in which approximately six million European Jews were systematically murdered throughout German-occupied Europe. Since World War II, several countries have criminalised Holocaust denial—the assertion by antisemites that the genocide was a hoax. Currently, 17 European countries, along with Israel and Canada, have laws in place that cover Holocaust denial as a punishable offence. Many countries also have broader laws that criminalise genocide denial, including that of the Holocaust. Among the countries that have banned Holocaust denial, Russia, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania have also banned Nazi symbols. Any expression of genocide justification is also a criminal offence in several countries, as is any attempt to portray Nazism in a positive light.
Hate media is a form of violence which helps demonize and stigmatize people that belong to different groups. This type of media has had an influential role in the incitement of genocide, with its most infamous cases perhaps being Radio Televizija Srbije during wars in Yugoslavia, Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM) during the Rwandan genocide and Nazi Germany’s Der Stürmer.
Richard Ashby Wilson is an American–British social anthropologist of law and human rights. He is the Gladstein Distinguished professor of Human Rights and Professor of Anthropology and Law at the University of Connecticut. In 2021, Wilson became the Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Intellectual Life at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Wilson established the interdisciplinary Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut and was the Director of the Human Rights Institute from 2003 to 2013. Wilson is one of the founders of the anthropology of human rights and was editor and an author of Human Rights, Culture and Context (1997), the first edited volume in the field of the anthropology of human rights.
Incitement to genocide is a crime under international law which prohibits inciting (encouraging) the commission of genocide. An extreme form of hate speech, incitement to genocide is considered an inchoate offense and is theoretically subject to prosecution even if genocide does not occur, although charges have never been brought in an international court without mass violence having occurred. "Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" was forbidden by the Genocide Convention in 1948. Incitement to genocide is often cloaked in metaphor and euphemism and may take many forms beyond direct advocacy, including dehumanization and accusation in a mirror. Historically, incitement to genocide has played a significant role in the commission of genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide.
Gregory S. Gordon is an American scholar of international law and a former genocide prosecutor during the Media Case at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Gordon is known for his advocacy of the criminalization under international law of a broader category of speech likely to cause mass atrocities, and his book Atrocity Speech Law in which he advances this argument.
Susan Benesch is an American journalist and scholar of speech who is known for founding the Dangerous Speech Project. Benesch is a free speech advocate, recommending the use of counterspeech rather than censorship to delegitimize harmful speech.
Hate speech is public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation".
Genocide justification is the claim that a genocide is morally excusable or necessary, in contrast to genocide denial, which rejects that genocide occurred. Perpetrators often claim that the genocide victims presented a serious threat, meaning that their killing was legitimate self-defense of a nation or state. According to modern international criminal law, there can be no excuse for genocide.
Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Accusation in a mirror (AiM) is a technique where one falsely attributes to one's adversaries the intentions that one has for oneself and/or the actions that one is in the process of enacting. It has been cited, along with dehumanization, as one of the indirect or cloaked forms of incitement to genocide, which has contributed to the commission of genocide, for example in the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. By invoking collective self-defense, accusation in a mirror is used to justify genocide, just as self-defense is a defense for individual homicide.
References
- ↑ Benesch 2008, p. 511.
- 1 2 Wilson 2017, p. 5.
