International | Classifying acts of evil

Naming the unspeakable

Genocide overshadows other crimes against humanity

Lambs to the slaughter

AMONG lawyers and scholars who study conflict, the word “genocide” is sometimes grimly described as the ultimate prize. A judgment that a continuing conflict involves genocide makes intervention more likely. Survivors of a group that has suffered mass slaughter may find a measure of solace when some authority formally acknowledges that what happened was the most heinous of crimes.

But when that recognition is denied because of a legal technicality—or political expediency—survivors can feel that the victims’ memory has been insulted. “The campaign to outlaw genocide has succeeded in important ways, by making the crime so toxic that it is likely to prompt international action,” says Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch, a monitoring group. “But there are other crimes which deserve a lot more attention than they get.”

The term came into use with the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which 146 countries have signed. It proscribes acts including killing, inflicting physical or mental harm, forced adoption and eugenics, when done “with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Politically or ideologically motivated killings were excluded: Stalin would hardly have signed had genocide included his massacres of entire classes, such as “middle peasants”. And it sets a high bar by requiring proof of intent. Apologists for the Ottoman empire argue that the deaths of Armenians in 1915 were a side-effect rather than the desired result. Evidence of orders to kill, apparently conveyed orally, is elusive (though it convinces many scholars).

The post-war Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals were set up to try “crimes against humanity”. That term has gained greater currency in the past 25 years, and accounts for most of the work of the ad hoc courts set up to try war crimes in former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Cambodia and the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC), created in 2002. (At the court on the mass killings in Rwanda in 1994, their genocidal nature was not in doubt.) The definition has been broadened since Nuremberg, when the Allies regarded crimes against humanity as an aspect of aggressive war. The ICC’s working definition includes killing, persecuting, putting to flight and sexual violence when “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population”.

Some war crimes, including torture and enforced disappearance, have dedicated UN treaties, points out William Schabas of Middlesex University. But there is none which covers crimes against humanity in general. The International Law Commission, a UN-mandated body, has sketched out a draft with support from scholars, including Mr Schabas.

The idealism that prompted international debate during the past quarter-century about how to define and punish war crimes seems to be ebbing. It is unlikely that any more ad hoc war-crimes tribunals will be set up, and the ICC is struggling to maintain its moral authority. As a matter of practical politics, there is little chance of the genocide convention being renegotiated. Its flaws will stay. But an effort to pin down the meaning of “crimes against humanity” would remind the world that there are other unspeakable acts.

This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "Naming the unspeakable"

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