The Concept of Genocide and the Partial Destruction of the National Group

DANIEL FEIERSTEIN

Logos. A Journal of Modern Society & Culture

Logos Journal

Año: 2012 p. 1 - 8

1543-0820

Ever since the 3rd U.N. General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, 1948, international law has faced a paradox. The international community resolved to make the systematic annihilation of populations a universal jurisdiction crime with no statute of limitations. But by protecting some groups and excluding others such as political, gender and sexual identity groups from its protection, it created a legal instrument that has proved to be almost useless given that nearly all modern genocides are, to some degree, politically motivated. Indeed, despite the global proliferation of genocide in the second half of the twentieth century, the first conviction for genocide by an international court was not until 50 years later in 1998. Since then, the number of convictions has been disappointingly low. The steady stream of protest over the years about the wording of the Convention has made little difference. Pioneers of Genocide Studies such as Leo Kuper, Israel Charny, Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn all complained about it, as did Benjamin Whitaker. However, the 1985 Whitaker Report – one of two major United Nations documents on genocide – was never even discussed by the U.N. General Assembly and when the narrow 1948 definition of genocide was included in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1998, further discussion seemed useless. Many judges and academics abandoned the notion of genocide in favor of “crimes against humanity.” Nevertheless, this paper will argue that the concept of genocide is still relevant in the twenty-first century. In particular, it will show that: 1) The Genocide Convention does not exclude Lemkin’s essential notion that modern genocides are attempts to destroy the identity of national groups. Therefore the concept of genocide can be applied to a much wider range of cases than is generally supposed. 2) The notion of “destruction of a group” is specific to the concept of genocide and is not contained in the definition of “crimes against humanity”. 3) The broadening of crimes against humanity (to include “terrorism” among others) makes it all the more important to distinguish such crimes from genocide. Arguably, accusations of human rights violations are already being used to undermine the sovereignty and political independence of non-hegemonic states with the excuse of defending an ever increasingly list of loosely defined “human rights”. In such cases, the genocides of the past can easily provide an excuse for armed intervention in quite different situations, to neutralize insurgent or opposition groups.