By Elena Kingsbury, Senior FSWC Educator

The following section supports Strand B3.5 of the Ontario Grade 6 Social Studies curriculum: Learning on the impact that global changes in understanding and legislation around human rights since World War II have had on the development of Canada’s responses to acts of hate and human rights violations.

(Canadian government response to the Holocaust, acts of hate and human rights violations. Learning on the responses of the Canadian government to human rights violations during the Holocaust).

Lemkin and The Genocide Convention, 1948

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, or the Genocide Convention, is an international treaty that criminalizes genocide and requires state parties to work towards prevention or if necessary, intervention. It was the first legal instrument to formalize genocide as a crime, and the first human rights treaty unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, on December 9, 1948, during the third session of the United Nations General Assembly. Until 1944, the international community lacked even an adequate description or legal definition of this type of crime.

The absence of a distinct term was a lifelong obsession for Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish legal scholar and Holocaust survivor who made connections between the Nazi extermination of European Jews and the Turkish mass murder of Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire. Not only did Lemkin coin the word genocide; he led a successful international campaign to have the concept adopted as a legal framework by the United Nations in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.  

Lemkin first defined genocide in a work of scholarship called Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944. Defining genocide as the destruction of “a nation or an ethnic group,” he wrote, “Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.” Lemkin was emphasizing the idea that people were subject to violence not because of anything they had done personally, but because of the identity group to which they belonged.

Lemkin's idea of genocide as an offence against international law was widely accepted by the international community and served as one of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials. In 1945 to 1946, he was an advisor to Supreme Court of the United States Justice and Nuremberg Trial chief counsel Robert H. Jackson. The book became one of the foundational texts in Holocaust studies, and the study of totalitarianism, mass violence and genocide studies.

While genocides still, sadly, occur in our world today, Lemkin should be remembered as an educator and champion of human rights who gave the world the words with which to name and denounce an unspeakable crime. In naming and mapping the dimensions of genocide, he guided humanity toward a greater understanding of the sociology of violence, and a greater ability to take meaningful action to prevent it.

Lemkin died in 1959, believing his efforts to prevent genocide had failed. It was only decades later, in the 1990s, that he became much better known when international prosecutions of genocide began in response to atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. It was then that “genocide” became widely understood as the worst of all crimes.

Sources:

https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/raphael-lemkin-genocide-convention

https://web.archive.org/web/20230623112630/https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/coining-a-word-and-championing-a-cause-the-story-of-raphael-lemkin

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