Human Rights Investigation: Genocide.
What is it?
The crime of destroying or conspiring to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
Genocide can be committed in a number of ways, including killing members of a group or causing them serious mental or bodily harm by deliberately initiating conditions that will results in physical destruction or imposing measures on a group to prevent births
Background
The current archetype of contemporary genocide is the holocaust whereby German Nazis starved, tortured, and executed an estimated 6 million Jews, as well as millions of ethnic minorities to develop a ‘master race’. Additionally, the incident that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 was an act of genocide by the Hutus-dominated government seeking to destroy Rwanda’s Tutsi peoples as well as Hutus that opposed the government’s extremist politics. Political tensions and conflicts in Rwanda as far back as colonial period gave rise to the tension between the Hutus and the Tutsi people. In just over three-months over one-million people were annihilated by the government. This genocide is regarded as one of the most fastest and vicious genocide in history.
Legislation:
In 1995, the United Nations established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Over seventy suspects were indicted and convicted by the Tribunal.
Following the exterminations of WWII the UN passed a resolution in an effort to prevent such atrocities to occur again in the forth coming future. This was labelled the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the crime of Genocide (December 9th 1948). Genocide was now recognised as an international crime and provided forits punishment.
In 1945-46 the Nuremberg Trials put top Nazi leaders accountable for their actions. In 1948, when the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted, the UN General Assembly asked the International Law Commission to develop a treaty establishing a court to hear and determine charges of genocide. However, the Cold War put an end to the project. In the 1990s, the UNSC established ad hoc international tribunals in response to the mass killings in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. In 1998, 160 countries and 200 NGOs participated in a conference resulting in the Rome Statute and the ICC came into being. The ICC finally gave teeth to the Geneva Conventions; previously, the ICRC had to depend on states to prosecute offenders. Individuals can now be prosecuted at the ICC for war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.
On November 4, 1988, the United States passed the Genocide Implementation Act of 1987.
This created:
"a new federal offense that prohibits the commission of acts with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group; and to provide adequate penalties for such acts"
The International Criminal Tribunals for Former Yugoslavia(ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) were convened in 1993 in the Hague, the Netherlands, and in 1995 in Arusha,Tanzania, respectively. As the first courts of their type since World War II, their work, which sought to fix personal responsibility for mass murder, continued into the new millennium.
Given the vast scope and complicated nature of trying crimes of genocide, neither body has moved swiftly. Byg2003, the ICTR had indicted 52 people and had completed nine trials stemming from the Rwanda slaughter, also becoming the first international court in history to hand down a conviction for genocide. The ICTY had indicted 87 people and had concluded 23 trials.
International Response To Protect Human Rights
INTERNATIONAL COURTS
In 1993, in response to massive atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the United Nations Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). It was the first international criminal tribunal since Nuremberg and the first ever mandated to prosecute the crime of genocide.
A year later, in response to devastating violence in Rwanda, the Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Nearing the completion of their mandates, both of tribunals have contributed detail, nuance, and precedent to the application of the law of genocide.
In 1998, the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court (ICC) established the first permanent international criminal court. The Rome Statute’s drafting process and the ICC’s ongoing case against the president of Sudan have added further clarifications to the international law of genocide. In 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which hears cases between states, issued a landmark decision addressing state responsibility to prevent and punish genocide in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro.
EVOLUTION OF Genocide LAWS
Article I of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
“The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and punish.”
Significantly, Article 1 of the Convention establishes the crime of genocide in times of war or peace. In 1948, this definition differed considerably from that of crimes against humanity, which only concerned violations against civilians during war—a limitation on the definition that no longer applies.
The 2007 ICJ decision in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro—which found that Serbia violated its responsibility to prevent and punish genocide at Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina—clarified that a state’s prevention and punishment obligations extend beyond its own borders. The decision asserted that States are obliged to take “all means reasonably available to them, so as to prevent genocide so far as possible.” This obligation exists regardless of whether the state’s efforts to influence the perpetrators changes the outcome.
Article II:
Acts of Genocide
The tribunals have elaborated on the act of “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.” In the Akayesu case, the ICTR decided that the harm need not be permanent or irremediable and can include torture, be it “bodily or mental, inhumane or degrading treatment, persecution.” The judgment in this case allowed rape to be considered an act of genocide when committed with the intent to destroy a protected group. The tribunals further confirmed that the harm also includes sexual violence that falls short of killing. Important decisions that concern the act of causing serious bodily or mental harm include the ICTR cases against Jean-Paul Akayesu and Laurent Semanza.