A crime against international law consisting of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of such a group; (b) Causing serious bodily harm or mental disorder to members of such a group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on any group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures calculated to prevent the birth of children within such a group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of one group to another.

The introduction of the legal concept of the crime of genocide occurred as a reaction to the Holocaust under the influence of the ideas of Raphael (Raphael) Lemkin and the documents of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The relevant definition was first enshrined in Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and reproduced without change, in particular, in Article 4 (2) of the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Article 2 (2) of the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The International Court of Justice of the United Nations has repeatedly confirmed that the prohibition of genocide is among the peremptory norms of general international law (jus cogens).

International law provides for the obligations of states not only not to commit genocide, but also to actively prevent its commission, as well as to bring perpetrators to criminal responsibility, including on the basis of the principle of universal jurisdiction (i.e. regardless of the place of its commission, the nationality of the perpetrators and victims of the crime, etc.). In addition, individuals are criminally liable for committing genocide directly under international law: the ICTR and ICTY have issued corresponding verdicts, and the ICC has issued arrest warrants for several suspects in the crime of genocide.

Mykola Hnatovsky, judge of the European Court of Human Rights
Timur Korotky, vice-president of the Ukrainian Association of International Law

Rafal Lemkin. Photo from the UN archive

Dr. R. Lemkin, Department of Information and Radio, United Nations.

Visit of the UN Secretary-General to Auschwitz-Birkenau. UN Photo/Evan Schneider

Participation in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Film about the Convention