The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 and came into effect in January 1951. It defines and outlaws genocide, as a result of campaigning by Raphael Lemkin who had coined the term some years earlier. The total number of state parties is 135. United Nations General Assembly The United Nations General Assembly is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations. ... Wiktionary has a definition of: Genocide Genocide has been defined as the deliberate killing of people based on their ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, or (sometimes) politics, as well as other deliberate actions leading to the physical elimination of any of the above categories. ... Rafael Lemkin (1900-1959) was a Polish lawyer. ...

The Convention (in article 2) defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:"

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The convention was passed in order to outlaw actions similar to the Holocaust by Nazi Germany during World War II. Because the convention required the support of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc, it excluded actions undertaken by those nations. As a result, the convention excludes from the definition of genocide the killing of members of a social class, members of a political or ideological group, and that of cultural killings. Concentration camp inmates during the Holocaust The Holocaust was Nazi Germanys systematic genocide (ethnic cleansing) of various ethnic, religious, national, and secular groups during World War II, starting in 1941 and continuing through 1945. ... Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, commonly refers to Germany in the years 1933–1945, when it was under the firm control of the totalitarian and fascist ideology of the Nazi Party, with the Führer Adolf Hitler as dictator. ... Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km into the air. ... During the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc (or Soviet Bloc) comprised the following Central and Eastern European countries: Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Albania (until the early 1960s, see below), the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. ...

The United States became a signatory to the convention in 1988, though only with the proviso that it was immune from prosecution for genocide without its consent. (This proviso was also made by Bahrain, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Yemen, and Yugoslavia.) Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija in all south Slavic languages) is a term used for three separate but successive political entities that existed during most of the 20th century on the Balkan Peninsula in Europe. ...

All participating countries are required to prevent and punish actions of genocide in war and peacetime.

The first time that the 1948 law was enforced, occurred on September 2, 1998 when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a small town in Rwanda, guilty of nine counts of genocide. The lead prosecutor in this case was Pierre-Richard Prosper. Two days later, Jean Kambanda became the first head of government to be convicted of genocide. September 2 is the 245th day of the year (246th in leap years). ... 1998 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is a court under the auspices of the United Nations for the prosecution of offenses committed in Rwanda during the incident of genocide which occurred there during April, 1994, commencing on April 6. ... Jean-Paul Akayesu is the former mayor of Taba, a small town in Rwanda, who was found guilty of nine counts of genocide by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on September 2, 1998. ... Pierre-Richard Prosper was nominated by President George W. Bush on May 16, 2001 to be the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues. ... Jean Kambanda (19 October 1955 - ) was the Prime Minister in the Rwandan caretaker government from the start of the 1994 genocide. ...

See also

• International law

International law deals with the relationships between states, or between persons or entities in different states. ...

External links

• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide at Law-Ref.org (http://www.law-ref.org/GENOCIDE/index.html) - fully indexed and crosslinked with other documents
• List of 133 parties to the Genocide Convention (UNHCHR status report) (http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/treaty1gen.htm)
• List of over 50 nations not party to the Convention (http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/gencon/nonparties-alpha.htm)
• Info on the Genocide Convention at Prevent Genocide International (http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/)