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.
Roméo Antonius Dallaire is a Canadian retired politician and military officer who was a senator from Quebec from 2005 to 2014, and a lieutenant-general in the Canadian Armed Forces. He notably was the force commander of UNAMIR, the ill-fated United Nations peacekeeping force for Rwanda between 1993 and 1994, and for trying to stop the genocide that was being waged by Hutu extremists against Tutsis. Dallaire is a Senior Fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) and co-director of the MIGS Will to Intervene Project.
The Rwandan genocide occurred between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were killed by armed Hutu militias. Although the Constitution of Rwanda states that more than 1 million people perished in the genocide, the real number killed is likely lower. The most widely accepted scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsi deaths.
The failure of the international community to effectively respond to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has been the subject of significant criticism. During a period of around 100 days, between 7 April and 15 July, an estimated 500,000-1,100,000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsi and moderate Hutu, were murdered by Interahamwe militias.
The Responsibility to Protect is a global political commitment which was endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit in order to address its four key concerns to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The doctrine is regarded as a unanimous and well-established international norm over the past two decades.
The Lion, the Fox & the Eagle: A Story of Generals and Justice in Rwanda and Yugoslavia is a non-fiction book by Canadian journalist Carol Off. The hardcover edition was published in November 2000 by Random House Canada. The writing was favourably received and the book was short-listed for the Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing. With numerous interviews and extensive research behind it, the book presents biographies of three Canadians in United Nations roles in the 1990s: Roméo Dallaire, Lewis MacKenzie, and Louise Arbour.
Transitional justice is a process which responds to human rights violations through judicial redress, political reforms in a region or country, and other measures in order to prevent the recurrence of human rights abuse. Transitional justice consists of judicial and non-judicial measures implemented in order to redress legacies of human rights abuses. Such mechanisms "include criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations programs, and various kinds of institutional reforms" as well as memorials, apologies, and various art forms. Transitional justice is instituted at a point of political transition classically from war to positive peace, or more broadly from violence and repression to societal stability and it is informed by a society's desire to rebuild social trust, reestablish what is right from what is wrong, repair a fractured justice system, and build a democratic system of governance. The core value of transitional justice is the very notion of justice—which does not necessarily mean criminal justice. This notion and the political transformation, such as regime change or transition from conflict are thus linked to a more peaceful, certain, and democratic future.
Gregory H. Stanton is the former Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. He is best known for his work in the area of genocide studies. He is the founder and president of Genocide Watch, the founder and director of the Cambodian Genocide Project, and the Chair of the Alliance Against Genocide. From 2007 to 2009 he was the president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002) is a book by American Samantha Power, at that time Professor of Human Rights Practice at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, which explores the United States's understanding of, response to, and inaction on genocides in the 20th century, from the Armenian genocide to the "ethnic cleansings" of the Kosovo War. It won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2003.
Stephen J. Rapp is an American lawyer and the former United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice.
The Will to Intervene (W2I) Project is a research initiative created by Lieut. General (retired) Roméo Dallaire, Senior Fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS), and Dr. Frank Chalk, MIGS Director, that aims to operationalize the principles of the responsibility to protect within national governments.
The All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Prevention of Genocide and other Crimes Against Humanity is an informal group of Parliamentarians composed of members from all parties in the House of Commons of Canada and the Senate of Canada with an interest in the prevention of genocide and similar crimes against humanity.
The Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights (CGHR) is a non-profit organization established in 2008 and based at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. CGHR examines genocide and mass violence -- as well as their aftermaths and prevention -- through an annual center-wide thematic as well as longer-term projects on global challenges like prevention, bigotry and hate, education and resilience, and Mideast and U.S.-Russian dialogue. In addition, CGHR hosts the UNESCO Chair in Genocide Prevention. CGHR is led by founder and Director Alexander Hinton and Associate Director Nela Navarro and involves the work of a team of visiting scholars, project leaders, affiliated faculty and students, and partners across the United States and the globe.
The Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention is an international non-governmental organisation based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with approximately 60 members in North America. Its mission is "to prevent the crime of genocide worldwide through effective early warning and cooperation with victimized peoples to carry out non-violent prevention initiatives." The Sentinel Project was founded in 2008 by two students, Taneem Talukdar and Christopher Tuckwood, at the University of Waterloo. In 2009, the Sentinel Project's approach was selected as a finalist in Google's 10 to the 100th competition for innovative social application of technology. This organization has been recognized as one of four active anti-genocide organizations based in Canada and is a member of the International Alliance to End Genocide, and the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect.
Prevention of genocide is any action that works toward averting future genocides. Genocides take a lot of planning, resources, and involved parties to carry out, they do not just happen instantaneously. Scholars in the field of genocide studies have identified a set of widely agreed upon risk factors that make a country or social group more at risk of carrying out a genocide, which include a wide range of political and cultural factors that create a context in which genocide is more likely, such as political upheaval or regime change, as well as psychological phenomena that can be manipulated and taken advantage of in large groups of people, like conformity and cognitive dissonance. Genocide prevention depends heavily on the knowledge and surveillance of these risk factors, as well as the identification of early warning signs of genocide beginning to occur.
Holocaust education is efforts, in either formal or informal settings, to teach about the Holocaust. Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust addresses didactics and learning, under the larger umbrella of education about the Holocaust, which also comprises curricula and textbooks studies. The expression "Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust" is used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
The Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR) is a Canadian non-governmental organization dedicated to pursuing justice through the protection and promotion of human rights. The RWCHR's name and mission is inspired by Raoul Wallenberg's humanitarian legacy.
The Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace, and Security is an institute at Dalhousie University that works to end the recruitment and use of child soldiers. The initiative was founded by Roméo Dallaire and Jacqueline O'Neill in 2007, and is situated in Halifax, Nova Scotia with offices in Kigali, Rwanda and Juba, South Sudan.
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.
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, national parliaments including those of Poland, Ukraine, Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ireland declared that genocide was taking place. Scholars and commentators including Eugene Finkel, Timothy D. Snyder and Gregory Stanton; and legal experts such as Otto Luchterhandt and Zakhar Tropin, have made claims of varying degrees of certainty that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. A comprehensive report by the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights concluded that there exists a "very serious risk of genocide" in Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
