Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on December 9, 1948. Within three years the Convention obtained the twenty ratifications required for entry into force. By 2003 some 130 states had ratified or acceded to the Convention. Accordingly, they are bound as a matter of international law to respect the obligations that it enumerates. But even for those states who have not, the key provisions of the Convention are widely accepted as a codification of customary legal norms that bind all states.

In his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the inventor of the term genocide, Raphael Lemkin, deplored the shortcomings in the international legal protection of national minorities. He called for the development within international criminal law of an express prohibition on the destruction of minorities, which he named the crime of...