At the beginning of World War II, the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, described the Nazi atrocities of the Jewish people as a “crime without a name.”
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who lost much of his family in the Holocaust and fled to the United States, decided to name such a crime. Mr. Lemkin’s word, “holocaust,” first appeared in the 1944 book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.” In 1948, the newly founded United Nations used the word genocide in its “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” (Res. UNGA 260 A [III]).
While the word genocide is recent, the reality is not. Wars of extermination are as old as human history itself. As the Ottoman Empire unraveled during World War I and its immediate aftermath, armed forces within the empire slaughtered more than a million Armenian and Assyro-Chaldean Christians.
In the Bible we find the ḥerem, or ban, in which Joshua in the battle of Jericho (Josh 6:19) “enforced the curse of destruction on everyone in the city: men and women, young and old, including the oxen, sheep and donkeys, slaughtering them all.”
Tragically, the author of Ecclesiastes is correct; there is nothing new under the sun.
Mr. Lemkin’s naming of the crime without a name, and the United Nations 1948 Genocide Convention, came at a point in human history where technology has made genocide easier and more murderously effective than ever before. Weapons of mass destruction and modern technology make mass killings easier and less costly for the perpetrators. If we are honest, the difference between a “surgical strike” and genocide is at times little more than the size of the group the attacker wants “excised.”
As of June 2024, 153 states have ratified or acceded to the convention; there are 193 member states in the General Assembly.
The 1948 Genocide Convention remains one of the most important documents on genocide and, perhaps even more importantly, an extremely helpful — if limited — tool in dealing with such crimes. As the “crime without a name,” genocide was also a crime without a legal definition. The convention changed that, defining genocide as “any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The title of the 1948 Genocide Convention is also important. It is not merely a convention against genocide nor simply an attempt to give a legal definition to genocide. The document stresses prevention and punishment, hence its name, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” The stress on prevention is a clear indication the convention does not go into effect only after the crime of genocide has been committed. Article III lists the following acts as punishable:
- conspiracy to commit genocide;
- direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
- attempt to commit genocide;
- complicity in genocide.
Signatories to the convention are required to “enact the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present convention and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide” or the act enumerated above.
Signatories to the convention are obliged to prosecute and punish genocide that is clearly defined in international law and treaty obligations.
Since the publication of the convention, there have, nevertheless, been egregious examples of what would be considered genocide, such as the Khmer Rouge in southeast Asia, multiple examples in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, including a growing consensus in the international community that what is happening in Gaza constitutes genocide. Even as the Israeli military launched its ground offensive in Gaza City on 16 September 2025, after besieging the enclave with intensive airstrikes, a United Nations commission investigating the war stated that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide:
“The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza.”
A spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry denounced the statement as “fake.”
Last week, the Holy See’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, noted that some European priests and bishops, in signing a document describing the situation in Gaza as genocide “probably found, in what is happening, elements to apply that definition. We — for the moment — have not done so yet,” he said, adding: “This remains to be seen. It is necessary to study; the conditions must be exactly met in order to make such a statement.”
There is no question that the United Nations 1948 Genocide Convention is crucial in the world today. However, the practical impact of the convention is limited by one of the major weaknesses — if not the major weakness — of the United Nations in general: its inability to enforce.
The United Nations Security Council is the only U.N. body that can legally use coercive force against a member state. The security council consists of 15 members, however, including the Permanent Five: The People’s Republic of China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States; and the elected 10, who are elected cyclically for two-year terms by the U.N. General Assembly. A serious weakness exists in the council in that any and every member of the Permanent Five has the total and absolute right of veto and there is no mechanism to override such a veto. It is not unheard of for a 14-1 resolution being stopped in its tracks by such a veto.
With the advances of artificial intelligence and modern weaponry, the real test of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is how to implement an effective and enforceable policy inhibiting one party from extinguishing another.