General view of the World Court inside The Hague's Peace Palace Monday April 29, 1996, where Bosnia went to court to seek a verdict against Serbia, charged with violations of the Genocide Convention. Serbia had protested that the court has no jurisdiction over the complaint. The case marked the first time a nation had been charged before the U.N. court with genocide. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
By William A. Schabas
The Genocide Convention marked its 60th anniversary on December 9, 2008. The occasion was marked by a gaggle of international conferences, the release of the report of a prestigious panel authored by prominent American opinion-makers, and anxiety about the pending application by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for a warrant of arrest charging the President of Sudan with genocide. Never since adoption of the Convention, in 1948, has the subject been so prominent on the global agenda. By comparison, in 1998, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Convention, only a few modest commemorations took place, accompanied by the publication of an obscure book of essays, in French.
Yet, in a strictly legal sense, genocide has never before been so unimportant. Subject to some insignificant technical quibbles, the crime of genocide constitutes the most aggravated or extreme form of crimes against humanity. The relationship between the two might be compared with that of murder and manslaughter in ordinary criminal law. Every intentional murder is also a homicide, but the reverse cannot be said. The category of crimes against humanity covers an immensely broader spectrum of atrocities than genocide, which is limited to the destruction of national, ethnic, racial and religious groups. Not only do crimes against humanity extend to ‘persecutions’ and ‘other inhumane acts,’ they are also applicable to political and social groups.
What then is the interest in the distinction between the two? As far as legal consequences are concerned, it no longer has any importance. The International Criminal Court may prosecute both genocide and crimes against humanity. The most severe sentence of life imprisonment may be imposed for either crime. The rather nebulous obligations set out in the 1948 Genocide Convention in terms of national prosecution, extradition and prevention would today all be taken to apply in the same manner to crimes against humanity, although by virtue of customary law rather than treaty obligation.
Indeed, customary law is important here not only for crimes against humanity but also genocide, because more than fifty States have yet to ratify the Convention. A great innovation in recent years has been the robust new doctrine of the responsibility to protect. But it applies equally to both genocide and crimes against humanity. Compared with crimes against humanity, genocide has only a slender advantage: the possibility of litigating a case before the International Court of Justice, something contemplated by article 9 of the 1948 Convention. Many cases have been filed before the Court on this basis, but there have been no real successes. In 2007, the Court dismissed the bulk of a Bosnian claim against Serbia, and essentially cautioned future applicants not to bother coming to The Hague except in the very clearest of cases.
This overlap of genocide and crimes against humanity is a very recent development, however. At Nuremberg, when the concept of crimes against humanity first emerged for the purpose of trying the Nazi war criminals, its scope was restricted to atrocities and persecutions carried out in association with the war. The limitation was quite deliberately imposed by the four victorious allies, who were nervous that their behaviour too might fit within the parameters of such a broad international crime. It was out of frustration with the limited concept of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg that the campaign for a genocide convention was born. The man who invented the word genocide, Raphael Lemkin, was dismayed by the judgment of the International Military Tribunal. He rushed back from Nuremberg to New York in order to promote a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly, then sitting at Lake Success in its very first session, condemning what he called ‘peacetime genocide’.
For about 50 years, the two categories of international atrocity crime – genocide and crimes against humanity – co-existed in a difficult relationship. Genocide was defined narrowly, limited to the intentional physical destruction of racial and similar groups, while crimes against humanity had a much broader reach, both in terms of the punishable acts and the civilian groups that were protected by it. But genocide was also broad, in that it could be committed in peacetime, whilst crimes against humanity remained saddled with a requirement of armed conflict. A yawning impunity gap divided the two categories of international crime: for example, international criminal law lacked any effective response to the fact of atrocities and persecutions, and even extermination, perpetrated against political groups in peacetime.
This gap between genocide and crimes against humanity essentially disappeared with the renaissance of international criminal law in the 1990s. The process began at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It was largely the work of activist judges. When the Security Council established the Tribunal in 1993, it stuck to conservative concepts and definitions that dated to the 1940s. A dynamic Appeals Chamber changed all of that by declaring that customary international law no longer imposed any link between crimes against humanity and armed conflict. Crimes against humanity have been at the core of virtually all of the convictions by the Tribunal. By comparison, genocide has not proven to be of much significance in terms of successful prosecutions, although a great deal of ink has been spilled on the subject. To date there have been no convictions for genocide by the Tribunal, and only one for aiding and abetting genocide, although the situation may change in the twilight of the institution with the multiple-defendant Popovic trial, which is virtually complete, and the pending proceedings against Radovan Karadzic. Had the Tribunal simply not bothered to prosecute genocide, arguably its work would have moved more quickly, and cost less.
The Rome Conference at which the Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted codified several important developments in the case law of the Yugoslavia Tribunal. The latter’s expansive approach to crimes against humanity was confirmed, meeting with broad support not only from those countries that supported the Court but even from those who were not so enthusiastic about the institution, like the United States. Rome was also an unrivalled occasion to revamp the definition of genocide, something that had been a leitmotif of the discourse of academic commentators and human rights activists for decades. But there was no traction for any change in the definition. At the Rome Conference, only Cuba suggested an amendment, so as to cover economic genocide (unrealistically targeted at the long-standing American embargo). One by one, States took the floor to insist that the 1948 definition be left unchanged. Article 6 of the Rome Statute, adopted in July 1998, is essentially identical to article 2 of the Genocide Convention, adopted 50 years earlier.
Of course, things might have developed differently. An expanded definition of genocide could well have emerged in the 1990s, thereby obviating the need to reform the law governing crimes against humanity. For whatever reason, international lawmakers chose one path over another. The important result is that the impunity gap was closed. The dire shortcoming in crimes against humanity, as defined at Nuremberg, a shortcoming that prompted Lemkin and others to push for a convention on ‘peacetime genocide,’ was now resolved.
There is one final chapter in this process. In the past decade, courts and quasi-judicial bodies have been solicited to undertake the task that the Rome Conference resisted. There have been efforts to obtain judicial recognition of a broadened concept of genocide before such bodies as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur and the International Court of Justice. None has met with much success. A few dissenting judges have adopted these more expansive positions. Such views have also been echoed by some national judges, in Brazil, Germany, Argentina and Spain. The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in his application for an arrest warrant directed against Sudanese President Omar el Bashir took a similarly expansive approach to the definition of what some have labelled ‘genocide by attrition’. At time of writing, it remains to be seen whether the judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber will concur. Given the extraordinary delay in ruling on the arrest warrant application, it would seem at the very least that they are vexed by this issue.
The manifestations of a broad or expansive approach to the definition of genocide still remain the exception that confirms the rule. The most important pronouncements by premier international bodies have tended to confirm the approach of the Rome Conference. It would be a mistake to dismiss this as some form of legal conservativism. Actually, the law has been extremely dynamic, but the energy has been transmitted to crimes against humanity, not genocide.
Yet outside the strict confines of legal debate, the word ‘genocide’ remains desperately important. According to the December 2008 report of the Genocide Prevention Task Force, chaired by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen, the word ‘genocide’ has the ability to ‘motivate and mobilize’. Albright and Cohen entitle their report ‘Preventing Genocide.’ Only on page 21, in a portion of the preface entitled ‘definitional traps,’ do they explain that they actual use the term ‘genocide’ to describe ‘mass atrocities,’ that is, ‘large scale and deliberate attacks on civilians.’ According to the report, the word ‘genocide’ is used as ‘a shorthand expression’ for a broader category of crimes in which crimes against humanity as well as genocide are subsumed. This is quite a stunning evolution in the nomenclature, especially because the explanation is tucked away obscurely at the end of the preface. It’s a bit like ordering champagne in a bar and being served ginger ale, only to be told that the barman has decided to use the term champagne to describe all fizzy drinks.
One way to view this ostensibly careless and potentially misleading use of precise terminology is as a further manifestation of the blurring of the distinctions between genocide and crimes against humanity. It may be the response of politicians to an evolving legal phenomenon, namely the declining significance in terms of legal consequences of labelling an act genocide rather than crimes against humanity. But one would normally expect the language to migrate in the opposite direction, with the general subsuming the particular. The law suggests growth and development under the rubric of crimes against humanity, yet the politicians cannot let go of genocide, because of the perceived potency of the word. Such an approach can only pay dividends in the short term. Over time, the word genocide, if used to describe all forms of mass atrocity, will probably lose its special stigma and with it the special ability to ‘motivate and mobilise.’
Crimes against humanity are used to describe a whole range of persecutions and atrocities, from brutal ethnic cleansing to discriminatory legislation to the nebulous catch-all of ‘other inhumane acts.’ If this linguistic evolution continues, the next time an evil regime attempts the physical extermination of an ethnic group we may find ourselves without a useful word to describe the phenomenon. In the early 1940s, Churchill described the destruction of the Jews as a crime without a name. Perhaps that situation will return.
Genocide has often been called the ‘crime of crimes’. Apparently Lemkin first used this expression in the 1940s, but it did not become a component of the discourse until the 1990s. Rwanda’s ambassador spoke of the ‘crime of crimes’ in the United Nations Security Council to describe the 1994 genocide. So did judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. But here there is a quarrel. The jurisprudence of the international criminal tribunals now holds to the view that there is no hierarchy between genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in terms of their objective gravity. A similar observation was made by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry into Darfur, possibly out of a desire to soften the consequences of its decision to describe the unfolding atrocities as crimes against humanity rather than genocide. This is not exactly a blurring of the distinction, along the lines of the Albright and Cohen report, yet it may amount to the same thing in the result.
Can it be correct to equate genocide and crimes against humanity in terms of their objective seriousness, as the Darfur Commission argued? Perhaps a parallel with ordinary crimes is helpful here. Virtually all legal systems treat murder as the ultimate crime. In most of the dwindling number of jurisdictions that retain capital punishment, penalty of death is reserved only for murder. Yet there is an enormous variation in the objective gravity of murders, ranging from the sinister hitman of an organised crime syndicate or the perverse serial killer to the grief-stricken family that resorts to euthanasia because the quality of life of an aging relative has been sapped by some devastating disease. Moreover, while negligent homicide or manslaughter is generally viewed as being less serious than murder, the widespread loss of life resulting from the carelessness of a mine operator, driven by greed, may strike us as far more heinous than an isolated murder. But the fact that in particular circumstances a case of manslaughter may be graver than a murder doesn’t alter the fundamental truth that taken in a general sense, we have no difficulty ranking murder ahead of manslaughter. Perhaps we should view the relationship of genocide and crimes against humanity in the same manner.
Genocide’s narrow definition was not the result of some arbitrary or illogical process. It reflects a determination by the international community, acting collectively through representative lawmakers in the United Nations General Assembly, to treat the intentional physical destruction of a national, ethnic, racial and religious group as a crime of particular importance. They might have included political or economic groups in the enumeration, just as they might have treated other forms of destruction (‘cultural genocide’) as acts as deserving of punishment as actual extermination. In their wisdom, they chose not to. The controversial definition of genocide adopted in 1948 reflects a vision by which the most serious crimes motivated by racial hatred call for special condemnation. We understand the legitimacy of this approach from the context of its adoption. The world was still in shock from fresh reports of the Holocaust. Perhaps it also reveals a more general recognition that the vile idea by which one racial or ethnic group was superior to another had poisoned humanity for centuries, and brought it to the brink of the apocalypse. The attempted destruction of the European Jews was only the most immediate manifestation of a much broader phenomenon, characterised by such phenomena as the slave trade and colonialism.
For these reasons, in 1948 genocide had a good claim to being described as the ‘crime of crimes.’ Sixty years after the Convention was adopted, its position at the apex of international crime is far less established. As a term, its scope, meaning and usefulness seem in a state of flux. Its legal significance by comparison with crimes against humanity has diminished greatly, while at the same time the colloquial use of the term reflects increased confusion as it is stretched to describe all forms of atrocity. Those who, like the author, consider that genocide still retains a special significance, something that is crystallised in the formula ‘crime of crimes,’ will have to recognise that its status in the system of international crime has never been so contested.
Professor William A. Schabas is the Professor of Human Rights Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway and the Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights.
Feedback:
The Crimes of War Project would welcome responses to the arguments made in this essay. Please submit them to our web editor at [email protected].
No related posts.
The Genocide Convention at 60
General view of the World Court inside The Hague's Peace Palace Monday April 29, 1996, where Bosnia went to court to seek a verdict against Serbia, charged with violations of the Genocide Convention. Serbia had protested that the court has no jurisdiction over the complaint. The case marked the first time a nation had been charged before the U.N. court with genocide. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
The Genocide Convention marked its 60th anniversary on December 9, 2008. The occasion was marked by a gaggle of international conferences, the release of the report of a prestigious panel authored by prominent American opinion-makers, and anxiety about the pending application by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for a warrant of arrest charging the President of Sudan with genocide. Never since adoption of the Convention, in 1948, has the subject been so prominent on the global agenda. By comparison, in 1998, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Convention, only a few modest commemorations took place, accompanied by the publication of an obscure book of essays, in French.
Yet, in a strictly legal sense, genocide has never before been so unimportant. Subject to some insignificant technical quibbles, the crime of genocide constitutes the most aggravated or extreme form of crimes against humanity. The relationship between the two might be compared with that of murder and manslaughter in ordinary criminal law. Every intentional murder is also a homicide, but the reverse cannot be said. The category of crimes against humanity covers an immensely broader spectrum of atrocities than genocide, which is limited to the destruction of national, ethnic, racial and religious groups. Not only do crimes against humanity extend to ‘persecutions’ and ‘other inhumane acts,’ they are also applicable to political and social groups.
What then is the interest in the distinction between the two? As far as legal consequences are concerned, it no longer has any importance. The International Criminal Court may prosecute both genocide and crimes against humanity. The most severe sentence of life imprisonment may be imposed for either crime. The rather nebulous obligations set out in the 1948 Genocide Convention in terms of national prosecution, extradition and prevention would today all be taken to apply in the same manner to crimes against humanity, although by virtue of customary law rather than treaty obligation.
Indeed, customary law is important here not only for crimes against humanity but also genocide, because more than fifty States have yet to ratify the Convention. A great innovation in recent years has been the robust new doctrine of the responsibility to protect. But it applies equally to both genocide and crimes against humanity. Compared with crimes against humanity, genocide has only a slender advantage: the possibility of litigating a case before the International Court of Justice, something contemplated by article 9 of the 1948 Convention. Many cases have been filed before the Court on this basis, but there have been no real successes. In 2007, the Court dismissed the bulk of a Bosnian claim against Serbia, and essentially cautioned future applicants not to bother coming to The Hague except in the very clearest of cases.
This overlap of genocide and crimes against humanity is a very recent development, however. At Nuremberg, when the concept of crimes against humanity first emerged for the purpose of trying the Nazi war criminals, its scope was restricted to atrocities and persecutions carried out in association with the war. The limitation was quite deliberately imposed by the four victorious allies, who were nervous that their behaviour too might fit within the parameters of such a broad international crime. It was out of frustration with the limited concept of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg that the campaign for a genocide convention was born. The man who invented the word genocide, Raphael Lemkin, was dismayed by the judgment of the International Military Tribunal. He rushed back from Nuremberg to New York in order to promote a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly, then sitting at Lake Success in its very first session, condemning what he called ‘peacetime genocide’.
For about 50 years, the two categories of international atrocity crime – genocide and crimes against humanity – co-existed in a difficult relationship. Genocide was defined narrowly, limited to the intentional physical destruction of racial and similar groups, while crimes against humanity had a much broader reach, both in terms of the punishable acts and the civilian groups that were protected by it. But genocide was also broad, in that it could be committed in peacetime, whilst crimes against humanity remained saddled with a requirement of armed conflict. A yawning impunity gap divided the two categories of international crime: for example, international criminal law lacked any effective response to the fact of atrocities and persecutions, and even extermination, perpetrated against political groups in peacetime.
This gap between genocide and crimes against humanity essentially disappeared with the renaissance of international criminal law in the 1990s. The process began at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It was largely the work of activist judges. When the Security Council established the Tribunal in 1993, it stuck to conservative concepts and definitions that dated to the 1940s. A dynamic Appeals Chamber changed all of that by declaring that customary international law no longer imposed any link between crimes against humanity and armed conflict. Crimes against humanity have been at the core of virtually all of the convictions by the Tribunal. By comparison, genocide has not proven to be of much significance in terms of successful prosecutions, although a great deal of ink has been spilled on the subject. To date there have been no convictions for genocide by the Tribunal, and only one for aiding and abetting genocide, although the situation may change in the twilight of the institution with the multiple-defendant Popovic trial, which is virtually complete, and the pending proceedings against Radovan Karadzic. Had the Tribunal simply not bothered to prosecute genocide, arguably its work would have moved more quickly, and cost less.
The Rome Conference at which the Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted codified several important developments in the case law of the Yugoslavia Tribunal. The latter’s expansive approach to crimes against humanity was confirmed, meeting with broad support not only from those countries that supported the Court but even from those who were not so enthusiastic about the institution, like the United States. Rome was also an unrivalled occasion to revamp the definition of genocide, something that had been a leitmotif of the discourse of academic commentators and human rights activists for decades. But there was no traction for any change in the definition. At the Rome Conference, only Cuba suggested an amendment, so as to cover economic genocide (unrealistically targeted at the long-standing American embargo). One by one, States took the floor to insist that the 1948 definition be left unchanged. Article 6 of the Rome Statute, adopted in July 1998, is essentially identical to article 2 of the Genocide Convention, adopted 50 years earlier.
Of course, things might have developed differently. An expanded definition of genocide could well have emerged in the 1990s, thereby obviating the need to reform the law governing crimes against humanity. For whatever reason, international lawmakers chose one path over another. The important result is that the impunity gap was closed. The dire shortcoming in crimes against humanity, as defined at Nuremberg, a shortcoming that prompted Lemkin and others to push for a convention on ‘peacetime genocide,’ was now resolved.
There is one final chapter in this process. In the past decade, courts and quasi-judicial bodies have been solicited to undertake the task that the Rome Conference resisted. There have been efforts to obtain judicial recognition of a broadened concept of genocide before such bodies as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur and the International Court of Justice. None has met with much success. A few dissenting judges have adopted these more expansive positions. Such views have also been echoed by some national judges, in Brazil, Germany, Argentina and Spain. The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in his application for an arrest warrant directed against Sudanese President Omar el Bashir took a similarly expansive approach to the definition of what some have labelled ‘genocide by attrition’. At time of writing, it remains to be seen whether the judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber will concur. Given the extraordinary delay in ruling on the arrest warrant application, it would seem at the very least that they are vexed by this issue.
The manifestations of a broad or expansive approach to the definition of genocide still remain the exception that confirms the rule. The most important pronouncements by premier international bodies have tended to confirm the approach of the Rome Conference. It would be a mistake to dismiss this as some form of legal conservativism. Actually, the law has been extremely dynamic, but the energy has been transmitted to crimes against humanity, not genocide.
Yet outside the strict confines of legal debate, the word ‘genocide’ remains desperately important. According to the December 2008 report of the Genocide Prevention Task Force, chaired by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen, the word ‘genocide’ has the ability to ‘motivate and mobilize’. Albright and Cohen entitle their report ‘Preventing Genocide.’ Only on page 21, in a portion of the preface entitled ‘definitional traps,’ do they explain that they actual use the term ‘genocide’ to describe ‘mass atrocities,’ that is, ‘large scale and deliberate attacks on civilians.’ According to the report, the word ‘genocide’ is used as ‘a shorthand expression’ for a broader category of crimes in which crimes against humanity as well as genocide are subsumed. This is quite a stunning evolution in the nomenclature, especially because the explanation is tucked away obscurely at the end of the preface. It’s a bit like ordering champagne in a bar and being served ginger ale, only to be told that the barman has decided to use the term champagne to describe all fizzy drinks.
One way to view this ostensibly careless and potentially misleading use of precise terminology is as a further manifestation of the blurring of the distinctions between genocide and crimes against humanity. It may be the response of politicians to an evolving legal phenomenon, namely the declining significance in terms of legal consequences of labelling an act genocide rather than crimes against humanity. But one would normally expect the language to migrate in the opposite direction, with the general subsuming the particular. The law suggests growth and development under the rubric of crimes against humanity, yet the politicians cannot let go of genocide, because of the perceived potency of the word. Such an approach can only pay dividends in the short term. Over time, the word genocide, if used to describe all forms of mass atrocity, will probably lose its special stigma and with it the special ability to ‘motivate and mobilise.’
Crimes against humanity are used to describe a whole range of persecutions and atrocities, from brutal ethnic cleansing to discriminatory legislation to the nebulous catch-all of ‘other inhumane acts.’ If this linguistic evolution continues, the next time an evil regime attempts the physical extermination of an ethnic group we may find ourselves without a useful word to describe the phenomenon. In the early 1940s, Churchill described the destruction of the Jews as a crime without a name. Perhaps that situation will return.
Genocide has often been called the ‘crime of crimes’. Apparently Lemkin first used this expression in the 1940s, but it did not become a component of the discourse until the 1990s. Rwanda’s ambassador spoke of the ‘crime of crimes’ in the United Nations Security Council to describe the 1994 genocide. So did judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. But here there is a quarrel. The jurisprudence of the international criminal tribunals now holds to the view that there is no hierarchy between genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in terms of their objective gravity. A similar observation was made by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry into Darfur, possibly out of a desire to soften the consequences of its decision to describe the unfolding atrocities as crimes against humanity rather than genocide. This is not exactly a blurring of the distinction, along the lines of the Albright and Cohen report, yet it may amount to the same thing in the result.
Can it be correct to equate genocide and crimes against humanity in terms of their objective seriousness, as the Darfur Commission argued? Perhaps a parallel with ordinary crimes is helpful here. Virtually all legal systems treat murder as the ultimate crime. In most of the dwindling number of jurisdictions that retain capital punishment, penalty of death is reserved only for murder. Yet there is an enormous variation in the objective gravity of murders, ranging from the sinister hitman of an organised crime syndicate or the perverse serial killer to the grief-stricken family that resorts to euthanasia because the quality of life of an aging relative has been sapped by some devastating disease. Moreover, while negligent homicide or manslaughter is generally viewed as being less serious than murder, the widespread loss of life resulting from the carelessness of a mine operator, driven by greed, may strike us as far more heinous than an isolated murder. But the fact that in particular circumstances a case of manslaughter may be graver than a murder doesn’t alter the fundamental truth that taken in a general sense, we have no difficulty ranking murder ahead of manslaughter. Perhaps we should view the relationship of genocide and crimes against humanity in the same manner.
Genocide’s narrow definition was not the result of some arbitrary or illogical process. It reflects a determination by the international community, acting collectively through representative lawmakers in the United Nations General Assembly, to treat the intentional physical destruction of a national, ethnic, racial and religious group as a crime of particular importance. They might have included political or economic groups in the enumeration, just as they might have treated other forms of destruction (‘cultural genocide’) as acts as deserving of punishment as actual extermination. In their wisdom, they chose not to. The controversial definition of genocide adopted in 1948 reflects a vision by which the most serious crimes motivated by racial hatred call for special condemnation. We understand the legitimacy of this approach from the context of its adoption. The world was still in shock from fresh reports of the Holocaust. Perhaps it also reveals a more general recognition that the vile idea by which one racial or ethnic group was superior to another had poisoned humanity for centuries, and brought it to the brink of the apocalypse. The attempted destruction of the European Jews was only the most immediate manifestation of a much broader phenomenon, characterised by such phenomena as the slave trade and colonialism.
For these reasons, in 1948 genocide had a good claim to being described as the ‘crime of crimes.’ Sixty years after the Convention was adopted, its position at the apex of international crime is far less established. As a term, its scope, meaning and usefulness seem in a state of flux. Its legal significance by comparison with crimes against humanity has diminished greatly, while at the same time the colloquial use of the term reflects increased confusion as it is stretched to describe all forms of atrocity. Those who, like the author, consider that genocide still retains a special significance, something that is crystallised in the formula ‘crime of crimes,’ will have to recognise that its status in the system of international crime has never been so contested.
Professor William A. Schabas is the Professor of Human Rights Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway and the Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights.
Feedback:
The Crimes of War Project would welcome responses to the arguments made in this essay. Please submit them to our web editor at [email protected].
No related posts.