Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Identification

The defining feature of the crime of genocide is the deliberate destruction of a group. That the term genocide denotes group destruction is evident in the term itself: Sensing that no word captured the horror of Nazi atrocities, Polish attorney Raphael Lemkin coined the term from the ancient Greek genos (meaning race, nation, or tribe) and the Latin suffix cide (meaning "killing") (1947, p. 147). Article II of the 1948 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (hereinafter referred to as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention) thus describes genocide as the commission of a specified act or acts "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such." Murder motivated by hatred of one person, as opposed to hatred of the group of which the person is a member, does not comport with this definition. Nor does the deliberate starvation...