DEFINITIONS OF GENOCIDE


1) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (relevant
Adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the U.N. General Assembly on 9 December 1948.
Entry into force: 12 January 1951.
 Article I: The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in
time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, 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.


2) from Raphael Lemkin's Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government
- Proposals for Redress, (Washington, D.C.:  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p.
79 - 95.


By "genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by
the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word
genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words
as tyrannicide, homocide, infanticide, etc.^(1) Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily
mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all
members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions
aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of
annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the
political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the
economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty,
health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is
directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against
individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.


3) Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Offences Against the Law of
Nations

By Raphael Lemkin,  lecturer on comparative law at the Institute of Criminology of the Free
University of Poland and Deputy Prosecutor of the District Court of Warsaw.

Additional explications to the Special Report presented to the 5th Conference for the Unification
of  Penal Law in Madrid (14 -20 October 1933)


 LET US CONSIDER, first and foremost, acts of extermination directed against the ethnic, religious
or social collectivities whatever the motive (political, religious, etc.); for example massacres,
pogroms, actions undertaken to ruin the economic existence of the members of a collectivity, etc.
Also belonging in this category are all sorts of brutalities which attack the dignity of the
individual in cases where these acts of humiliation have their source in a campaign of
extermination directed against the collectivity in which the victim is a member.

Taken as a whole, all the acts of this character constitute an offense against the law of nations
which we will call by the name "barbarity." Taken separately all these acts are punishable in the
respective codes; considered together, however, they should constitute offenses against the law of
nations by reason of their common feature which is to endanger both the existence of the
collectivity concerned and the entire social order.

4) Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn:
"Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to
destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator" (The History
and Sociology of Genocide , 1990).

Israel W. Charny:
5)"Genocide in the generic sense is the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when
not in the course of military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential
defenselessness and helplessness of the victims". (in Genocide: Conceptual and Historical
Dimensions ed. George Andreopoulos, 1994).

6) Helen Fein:
"Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity
directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group
members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim". (Genocide:
A Sociological Perspective, 1993/1990).

7)Barbara Harff and Ted R. Gurr:
"By our definition, genocides and politicides are the promotion and execution of policies by a
state or its agents which result in the deaths of a substantial portion of a group. The difference
between genocides and politicides is in the characteristics by which members of the group are
identified by the state. In genocides the victimized groups are defined primarily in terms of their
communal characteristics, i.e., ethnicity, religion or nationality. In politicides the victim
groups are defined primarily in terms of their hierarchical position or political opposition to the
regime and dominant groups" ("Toward empirical theory of genocides and politicides," International
Studies Quarterly 37, 3 [1988]).

8) Steven T. Katz:
"the concept of genocide applies only when there is an actualized intent, however successfully
carried out, to physically destroy an entire group (as such a group is defined by the
perpetrators)" (The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, Vol. 1, 1994).

9) Scott Spence,

“… an organized attempt to annihilate a group that a perpetrator constitutes as an organic
collectivity.”

(Journal of Genocide Research (2001), 3:3, pp. 349-375).