Intelligenger Journal |
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Subject: UN Genocide Treaty Date: Wednesday, December 09, 1998 8:40 AM U.N. Genocide Treaty, Finally Used In Court, Is 50 02:20 a.m. Dec 09, 1998 Eastern By Anthony Goodman UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations' genocide treaty was adopted 50 years ago Wednesday, but the attempt to stop the destruction of national, ethnic, racial or religious groups had to wait until 1998 to be used in a law court. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, drafted under the shadow of Nazi Germany's extermination of 6 million Jews in the Second World War, was finally used this year by a U.N. tribunal on genocide in Rwanda. Convention adherents agree to enact laws to give it effect and to try or extradite people charged under its provisions. The convention, which was adopted by a vote of 55-0 at a meeting of the U.N General Assembly in Paris on Dec. 9, 1948, crowned a personal crusade by a Polish Jewish professor of international law, Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin, who lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust, was said to have become concerned with the issue of the persecution of entire groups of people at the age of 12, when he read about the campaign against early Christians in the novel ''Quo Vadis'' by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz. Lemkin coined the word ``genocide'' by linking the Greek word for race, ``genos,'' with the Latin root for killing, ''-cide,'' and lobbied tirelessly to make it an international crime. The convention, in force since Jan. 12, 1951, defines genocide as the committing of certain acts with intent to destroy, wholly or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group and deems it a crime under international law, whether committed in war or peace. A party to the convention may call on U.N. bodies to take action for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide. Despite the convention, several certifiable cases of genocide have occurred in the past 50 years. Some tyrants known for genocide have even been feted and fawned over at the United Nations. In Rwanda, up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered by Hutu troops, militiamen and neighbors in 1994. Earlier, in Cambodia, an estimated 1.7 million people were killed during the rule of the radical communist Khmer Rouge over the period 1975-79. This September, a special U.N. tribunal set up in Arusha, Tanzania, to try leaders of the Rwanda genocide finally announced that the prescriptions of the genocide convention had been carried out by a court of law for the first time. Jean Paul Akayesu, a Hutu former mayor of Taba commune, was found guilty of nine criminal counts, including genocide, and given a life sentence. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, speaking in Paris Tuesday, said: ``Our time -- this decade, even -- has shown us that man's capacity for evil know no limits'' ``Genocide -- the destruction of an entire people on the basis of ethnic or national origins -- is now a word of our time too, a stark and haunting reminder of why our vigilance must be eternal.'' The genocide convention has been ratified by 127 countries. Although President Harry Truman signed it on Dec. 12, 1948, Washington did not complete ratification procedures until 1988. The United States thereby became the 99th member but only after decades of efforts to overcome objections by some senators that it compromised U.S. sovereignty. William Proxmire, a former Democratic senator from Wisconsin, made a speech at every Senate session for 19 years to press for ratification. Lemkin, who was found weeping in the darkened General Assembly hall after the convention was adopted 50 years ago, died in New York in 1959. |