The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide or better known as the Genocide Convention is an international treaty that criminalises genocide. It was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 as a response to World War 2 and entered into force on 12 January 1951.
The Genocide Convention obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition. What is Genocide? Article 2 of the Convention 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.
Article 3 defines the crimes that can be punished under the convention:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
Member states are prohibited from engaging in genocide and obligated to pursue the enforcement of this prohibition. All perpetrators are to be tried regardless of whether they are private individuals, public officials, or political leaders with sovereign immunity.
As of 2022, there are 152 state parties to the Genocide Convention, the latest addition nation being Mauritius in 2019 whilst interestingly, the United States became a party only in 1988—a full forty years after it was opened for signature.
The Genocide Convention grants the International Court of Justice (ICJ) mandatory jurisdiction to adjudicate disputes between nations and peoples, leading cases are the Rohingya genocide case in the Rakhine state and the dispute over the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine based on false claim of genocide by Ukraine against the Russian-speaking Ukrainians. The ICJ settles disputes between states and also gives advisory opinions on international legal issues. The ICJ is the only international court that adjudicates general disputes between countries where its rulings and opinions serve as primary sources of international law.
Who are the ICJ judges? The ICJ consists of a panel of 15 judges elected by the UN General Assembly and Security Council for nine-year terms. No more than one judge of each nationality may be represented at the same time. No Malaysian has sat as an ICJ Judge, to the best of our knowledge. The ICJ is seated in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, whilst the other 5 principal organs of the UN are located in New York City. What language is used in the ICJ? Its official working languages are English and French.