Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Economic Groups

Protection has traditionally been offered to those groups whose defining characteristics are as inflexible as their race. Amorphous qualities such as monetary wealth or property ownership can change. For this reason economic status alone probably is insufficient to qualify for protection under the laws concerning genocide or crimes against humanity, despite the fact that economic groups have been the target of persecution throughout history. Slaves, serfs, wage laborers, Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Native Americans, wealthy Jewish money lenders, the Chinese in southeast Asia, East Indians in Uganda, and caste members in Asia and Africa—all have at various times been the target of persecution. In almost all these situations, the desire for wealth and greed motivated the persecutors, but the economic status of the victims often was not the sole means of identifying them, because their economic status was coupled with...