The Genocides
genocide and crimes against humanity
The first legal definition of genocide dates back to 1915 and concerns the massacre of the Armenian population at the hands of the Turks, followed by the indictment and court-martial of those responsible. In the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres the major powers used the terms “crimes against civilization” and “crimes against the laws of humanity”.
At the end of World War II, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg opened the proceedings in the trials against the Nazi leaders by establishing the crimes over which the court had jurisdiction:
- crimes against peace, for which those responsible were indicted for conspiring and launching an aggressive war;
- war crimes, based on the principle of individual criminal responsibility;
- crimes against humanity, which included: “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, before or during the war; or persecutions, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated (...)“.
On 9 December 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations unanimously approved the “Convention for the prevention and repression of the crime of genocide”, considered the most serious crime against humanity:
"Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, 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 conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- forcibly transferring children of the group to another group “.
The crime of genocide includes:
- the intent to destroy a particular group;
- direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
- one or more criminal acts perpetrated against people as members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
In genocide people are persecuted because they belong to a group, often by another group in power that identifies itself with the Government. Genocide and crimes against humanity are imprescriptible.
In some countries the concept of genocide has been extended.
The 1992 French penal code introduced the intent to destroy a human group as such, sometimes identified according to inexistent premises: genocide is a crime "in the execution of a prearranged plan leading to the total or partial destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, or of a group established by any other arbitrary criteria”.
The Canadian penal code also considers “attempting, conspiring, complicity after the fact, advising, helping or encouraging the fact itself” a crime against humanity since these are elements that contribute to the assessment of individual responsibility, in the delicate relationship between executors and instigators and between executors and bystanders or witnesses.
Historical research is still far from applying this conceptual extension and only recently have scholars begun to study the genocides of the first part of the 20th century (e.g. Armenians, Kulaks and Ukrainians) and those that occurred in more recent years (the Khmer in Cambodia, the Tutsis in Rwanda, and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia).
