The U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was crafted in the aftermath of World War II, as part of an effort to understand the Holocaust, prevent a recurrence, and offer a potential crime for which German officials could be held accountable. The existence of the convention is itself quite remarkable. The term genocide had been coined only a few years earlier, by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, and his advocacy on behalf of the concept has to be considered one of the most successful efforts in world history to give real weight to a neologism.
Yet, from its inception, both the concept and the Genocide Convention were controversial and contested. During negotiations, the legal term was subject to jockeying from the major powers, who wanted carve-outs to avoid culpability for their own actions, past or planned. The final product was, therefore, both extremely narrow in what it defined as outside the scope of the convention, and maddeningly vague. I spoke with Ronan Lee, a vice chancellor and independent research fellow at Loughborough University London, who called it a “compromised document” due to its inherent limitations. “It’s a document of its time,” he noted. Nevertheless, it was an important innovation. “The very specific nature of genocide is that it’s a crime against a people,” he said.
The main text of the Genocide Convention is brief. It defines the crime as “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” by way of five acts: “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.”
Notably excluded from the definition of genocide were political or class groups, at the insistence of the Soviet Union, which did not want its leaders hauled before tribunals for the Great Terror, the Holodomor in Ukraine, or other Stalin-era mass killings. “The Soviet view was that they were destroying classes,” Lee argued. “So class is not listed.” This compromise made it more difficult to charge officials of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, which carried out a program of mass killing against its own citizens from 1975–79 but did not target any of the groups “as such” as outlined in the convention.