The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention, is an international treaty that criminalizes genocide and obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition. It was the first legal instrument to codify genocide as a crime and the first human rights treaty unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948, during the third session of the United Nations General Assembly. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951 and has 154 state parties .
The Genocide Convention was conceived largely in response to World War II, which saw atrocities such as the Holocaust that lacked an adequate description or legal definition. Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who had coined the term genocide in 1944 to describe Nazi policies in occupied Europe and the Armenian genocide, campaigned for its recognition as a crime under international law.Auron, Yair, The Banality of Denial, (Transaction Publishers, 2004), 9. Lemkin also linked colonialism with genocide, mentioning colonial genocides outside of Europe in his writings.: "Extra-European colonial cases also featured prominently in this projected global history of genocide. In 'Part III: Modern Times,' he wrote the following numbered chapters: (1) Genocide by the Germans against the Native Africans; (3) Belgian Congo; (11) Hereros; (13) Hottentots; (16) Genocide against the American Indians; (25) Latin America; (26) Genocide against the Aztecs; (27) Yucatan; (28) Genocide against the Incas; (29) Genocide against the Maoris of New Zealand; (38) Tasmanians; (40) S.W. Africa; and finally, (41) Natives of Australia ... While Lemkin's linking of genocide and colonialism may surprise those who think that his neologism was modeled after the Holocaust of European Jewry, an investigation of his intellectual development reveals that the concept is the culmination of a long tradition of European legal and political critique of colonization and empire." In a 1946 resolution, the General Assembly recognized genocide as an international crime and called for the creation of a binding treaty to prevent and punish its perpetration. Subsequent discussions and negotiations among UN member states resulted in the CPPCG.
The Convention defines genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". These five acts include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly. The convention further criminalizes "complicity, attempt, or incitement of its commission". Member states are prohibited from engaging in genocide and are 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.
The CPPCG has influenced law at both the national and international level. Its definition of genocide has been adopted by international and hybrid tribunals, such as the International Criminal Court, and incorporated into the domestic law of several countries. Its provisions are widely considered to be reflective of customary law and therefore binding on all nations whether or not they are parties. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has likewise ruled that the principles underlying the Convention represent a peremptory norm against genocide that no government can derogate. The Genocide Convention authorizes the mandatory jurisdiction of the ICJ to adjudicate disputes, leading to international litigation such as the Rohingya genocide case and the litigation over the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Definition of genocide Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as:
The Genocide Convention establishes those five prohibited acts that, when committed with the requisite intent, amount to genocide. Article 3 defines the related crimes that can be punished under the convention:
The convention was passed to outlaw actions similar to the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. Genocide is not just defined as wide-scale massacre-style killings that are visible and well-documented. The Genocide Convention's words "in whole or in part" were interpreted by the International Court of Justice in 2007 as follows:Schabas, William. Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes, p. 281 (Cambridge U. Press, 2009). In the first place, the intent must be to destroy at least a substantial part of the particular group. That is demanded by the very nature of the crime of genocide: since the object and purpose of the Convention as a whole is to prevent the intentional destruction of groups, the part targeted must be significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole.
The 1987 U.S. statute implementing the Genocide Convention likewise says that the words "in part" mean "in substantial part" and furthermore:
[T]he term "substantial part" means a part of a group of such numerical significance that the destruction or loss of that part would cause the destruction of the group as a viable entity within the nation of which such group is a part.Bellinger, John. "What the 'Genocide' Label Means for U.S. Foreign Policy", Council on Foreign Relations (7 Jan 2025).
The five broad types of genocidal violence, recognized by Article II of the Convention, can be described in more detail as follows.
Killing members of the group Article II(a) While mass killing is not necessary for genocide to have been committed, it has been present in almost all recognized genocides. In certain instances, men and adolescent boys are singled out for murder in the early stages, such as in the genocide of the Yazidis by Daesh, the Ottoman Turks' genocide of the Armenians, and the Rohingya genocide by the Burmese security forces.; Men and boys are typically subject to "fast" killings, such as by gunshot.Prosecutor v. Karadžić, Case No. IT-95-5/18-T, Trial Judgment, Int'l Crim. Trib. for the Former Yugoslavia, 24 March 2016 Women and girls are more likely to die slower deaths by slashing, burning, or as a result of sexual violence.; The jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), among others, shows that both the initial executions and those that quickly follow other acts of extreme violence, such as rape and torture, are recognized as falling under the first prohibited act.Prosecutor v. Semanza, Case No. ICTR-97-20-T, Trial Judgment, para. , 15 May 2003; Prosecutor v. Ntagerura, Case No. ICTR-99-46-T, Trial Judgment, para. , 24 February 2004,
A less settled discussion is whether deaths that are further removed from the initial acts of violence can be addressed under this provision of the Genocide Convention. Legal scholars have posited, for example, that deaths resulting from other genocidal acts, including causing serious bodily or mental harm or the successful deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, should be considered genocidal killings.
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group Article II(b) This second prohibited act can encompass a wide range of non-fatal genocidal acts. In practice, this could include deaths from the deliberate infection of Tutsi women with HIV/AIDS through rape in the Rwandan genocide or from the abuse and denial of food inflicted by ISIL on Yazidi sex slaves by ISIL's use of sexual slavery. To date, neither has been prosecuted as such. The ICTR and International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) have held that rape and sexual violence may constitute the second prohibited act of genocide by causing both physical and mental harm. In its landmark Akayesu decision, the ICTR held that rapes and sexual violence resulted in "physical and psychological destruction".Prosecutor v. Akayesu, Case No. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgment, 2 September 1998, para. 731. Sexual violence is a hallmark of genocidal violence, with most genocidal campaigns explicitly or implicitly sanctioning it. It is estimated that 250,000 to 500,000 women were raped in the three months of the Rwandan genocide, many of whom were subjected to multiple rapes or gang rape. In Darfur, a systemic campaign of rape and often sexual mutilation was carried out, and in Burma, public mass rapes and gang rapes were inflicted on the Rohingya by Burmese security forces. Sexual slavery was documented in the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks and Daesh's genocide of the Yazidi.
Torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, when committed with the requisite intent, are also genocide by causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. The ICTY found that both experiencing a failed execution and watching the murder of one's family members may constitute torture.Prosecutor v. Karadžić, Case No. IT-95-5/18-T, Trial Judgment, para. , Int'l Crim. Trib. for the Former Yugoslavia, 24 March 2016, para. 5664; Patricia Viseur Sellers, "Genocide Gendered: The Srebrenica Cases", The Fifth Annual Katherine B. Fite Lecture, Proceedings of the Ninth International Humanitarian Law Dialogs, 30 Aug. – 1 September 2015. The Syrian Commission of Inquiry (COI) also found that enslavement, removal of one's children into indoctrination or sexual slavery, and acts of physical and sexual violence rise to the level of torture as well. While it was subject to some debate, the ICTY and later the Syrian COI held that under some circumstances deportation and forcible transfer may also cause serious bodily or mental harm.Popović, Case No. IT-05-88-T, para. ; Tolimir, IT-05-88/2-A, para. ; Karadžić, IT-95-5/18-T, para. ;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction Article II(c)
The third prohibited act is distinguished from the genocidal act of killing because the deaths are not immediate (or may not even come to pass), but rather create circumstances that do not support prolonged life. Due to the longer period of time before the actual destruction would be achieved, the ICTR held that courts must consider the duration of time the conditions are imposed as an element of the act.Kayishema and Ruzindana, (Trial Chamber), 21 May 1999, para. 548 In the 19th century the United States federal government supported the extermination of bison, which Native Americans in the Great Plains relied on as a source of food. This was done for various reasons, primarily to pressure them onto reservations during times of conflict. Some genocide experts describe this as an example of genocide that involves removing the means of survival.