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The Genocide Portal

Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.

In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.

The Political Instability Task Force estimated that 43 genocides occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in about 50 million deaths. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence up to 2008. Genocide, especially large-scale genocide, is widely considered to signify the epitome of human evil. Genocide has been referred to as the "crime of crimes". (Full article...)

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The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in 2002 as a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression, although it cannot currently exercise its jurisdiction over the crime of aggression. The court can only prosecute crimes committed on or after July 1, 2002, the date its founding treaty, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, entered into force.

As of April 2007, 104 states are members of the Court, and a further 41 countries have signed but not ratified the Rome Statute. However, a number of states, including the United States, China and India, continue to oppose it.

The Court can generally only exercise jurisdiction in cases where the accused is a national of a state party, the alleged crime took place on the territory of a state party, or a situation is referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council. The Court is designed to complement existing national judicial systems: it can only exercise its jurisdiction when national courts are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute such crimes. Primary responsibility to exercise jurisdiction over suspected criminals is therefore left to individual states.

The official seat of the ICC is in The Hague, Netherlands, but its proceedings may take place anywhere. The Court is separate from, and should not be confused with, the International Court of Justice (often referred to as the “World Court”), which is the United Nations organ that settles disputes between nations.

"International Criminal Court" is sometimes abbreviated as ICCt to distinguish it from several other organizations abbreviated as ICC. However, the more common abbreviation "ICC" is used in this article.

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Israel W. Charny (born 1931) is an Israeli psychologist and genocide scholar. He is the editor of two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide, and executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. (Full article...)

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"If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. By violation of the Nuremberg laws I mean the same kind of crimes for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And Nuremberg means Nuremberg and Tokyo. So first of all you’ve got to think back as to what people were hanged for at Nuremberg and Tokyo. And once you think back, the question doesn’t even require a moment’s waste of time. For example, one general at the Tokyo trials, which were the worst, General Yamashita, was hanged on the grounds that troops in the Philippines, which were technically under his command (though it was so late in the war that he had no contact with them — it was the very end of the war and there were some troops running around the Philippines who he had no contact with), had carried out atrocities, so he was hanged. Well, try that one out and you’ve already wiped out everybody."

— Noam Chomsky, lecture at St. Michael's College, 1990

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Selected images

Image 1The bodies of the dead lie awaiting burial in a mass grave at the camp. (Bergen-Belsen concentration camp)
Image 2Mummified victims of the Rwandan Genocide (1994) at Murambi Technical School. Photograph taken in July 2001 by Emmanuel Cattier.
Image 3Original caption states: "Deep gashes delivered by the killers are visible in the skulls that fill one room at the Murambi School." Aftermath of Rwandan genocide.
Image 4"A relic of the Armenian massacres at Erzingan", image taken from US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau's memoirs (1918).
Image 5Bones of anti-Nazi German women still are in the crematoriums in the German concentration camp at Weimar (Buchenwald), Germany, taken by the 3rd U.S. Army. Prisoners of all nationalities were tortured and killed. 04/14/1945
Image 6Gas canisters and hair of Holocaust victims from a Nazi concentration camp.
Image 7Corpse of Soviet Famine victims transported to the cemetery. (Kherson)
Image 8Emaciated corpses of children in Warsaw Ghetto.
Image 9Picture showing Armenians killed during the Armenian Genocide. Image taken from Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, written by Henry Morgenthau, Sr. and published in 1918.
Image 10Rwandan refugee camp in Zaire.

Did you know...

... that historian Dirk Moses argues that The Problems of Genocide include "blinding us to other types of humanly caused civilian death"?
... that in South Africa's genocide case against Israel, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to "punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide" against Palestinians in Gaza?
... that in his book, Uğur Ümit Üngör argues that the Armenian Genocide contributed to The Making of Modern Turkey?
... that the 1914 Greek deportations have been described as "a trial run for the Armenian Genocide"?
... that the first use of the phrase "crimes against humanity" in diplomacy was in a May 1915 Entente declaration condemning the Armenian Genocide?
... that in Open Wounds, Vicken Cheterian argues that "by censoring the Armenian Genocide, its impact, traces and consequences do not simply disappear. It continues in various forms"?

Genocide lists

International prosecution of genocide (ad hoc tribunals)

It is commonly accepted that, at least since World War II, genocide has been illegal under customary international law as a peremptory norm, as well as under conventional international law. Acts of genocide are generally difficult to establish, for prosecution, since intent, demonstrating a chain of accountability, has to be established. International criminal courts and tribunals function primarily because the states involved are incapable or unwilling to prosecute crimes of this magnitude themselves.

For more information see:

Genocide: International prosecution of genocide (ad hoc tribunals)

International prosecution of genocide (International Criminal Court)

To date all international prosecutions for genocide have been brought in specially convened international tribunals. Since 2002, the International Criminal Court can exercise its jurisdiction if national courts are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute genocide, thus being a "court of last resort," leaving the primary responsibility to exercise jurisdiction over alleged criminals to individual states. Due to the United States concerns over the ICC, the United States prefers to continue to use specially convened international tribunals for such investigations and potential prosecutions.^[1]

For more information see:

Genocide: International prosecution of genocide (International Criminal Court)

References
^ "Statement by Carolyn Willson, Minister Counselor for International Legal Affairs, on the Report of the ICC, in the UN General Assembly" (PDF). (123 KiB) November 23 2005