What Is Genocide?

On the morning of March 15, 1921, a young man approached an older man on the streets of Berlin. The young man tapped the older man on the shoulder, pretending to know him. When the older man turned around, the young man pulled out a revolver and shot him dead. 

The crime appeared in newspapers around the world. One reader, Raphael Lemkin, a young law student at a Polish University, found the story confusing. 

It was a coordinated act of vengeance, he learned. The Ottoman Empire had carried out a mass extermination campaign against the Armenian people during World War I. The assassin himself had lost over eighty members of his family as a result. After the war, a group of Armenian revolutionaries set out to kill the former Ottoman officials that had organized the massacres.  

Lemkin asked his law professor about the article: Why hadn’t Armenia been able to arrest the former Ottoman official? If he had committed a crime against the Armenian people, why couldn’t Armenia prosecute him? 

The professor said there was no law that would allow the former official to be arrested. The Armenians were subjects of the Ottoman Empire at the time. And what the Ottomans did inside their own territory was their own business, at least according to contemporary law. 

Lemkin was shocked that the assassination of an Ottoman official could be considered a crime, but the mass killing of an ethnic group could not. Over the next two decades, he lobbied governments and international bodies to put a name to that act and to make it a crime under international law. During those years, the crime was repeated. In 1939, Lemkin, who was Jewish, fled Poland in the wake of a new campaign of extermination—the Holocaust. By the end of the Second World War, roughly six million Jews would be killed alongside other groups. 

Just like the Armenian he read about in the newspaper, Lemkin lost dozens of members of his own family. But Lemkin’s pursuit of justice took a different route. After the war, at the Nuremberg Trials, where Nazi leaders answered for their atrocities, Lemkin pushed for a new word to be added to the indictments: “genocide.” 

Finally, the crime was named. But how would it become international law? And could international laws prevent the crime from happening again? 

What does genocide mean?

Lemkin first used the term genocide in a 1944 book, combining the Greek word for “race” and “tribe” (genos) with the Latin suffix for “killing” (-cide). The word genocide, therefore, denotes the killing or destruction of a particular identity group. 

For years, Lemkin lobbied international bodies to recognize genocide as a crime. The Nuremberg trials were a first step, but the term genocide was only introduced in the trials to describe Nazi motivations; the defendants were not specifically charged with genocide. It wasn’t until 1946 that the United Nations recognized genocide as a crime under international law. Two years later, it further defined genocide in an international treaty—the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, often called the Genocide Convention. 

Genocide is a crime both in wartime and peacetime. The Genocide Convention defines the crime according to five acts. To be considered genocide, those acts must be carried out with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” 

The acts are as follows: 

Anyone can be accused of and punished for genocide—private citizens, soldiers, and even heads of state. 

One can also commit genocide without killing. (Despite using the Latin-derived suffix -cide, Lemkin intended the word genocide to also mean destruction.) The fifth act regarding forcibly moving children constitutes genocide. So long as the intent is to destroy a group, the act is considered genocide. 

How is genocide identified?

The Genocide Convention clearly defines genocide. But not everyone agrees on which atrocities fit the legal description. 

One challenge is determining intent. For an act to be considered genocide, a perpetrator must intend to destroy (in whole or in part) a particular group. 

Some legal experts claim this requirement is too strict and instead gives alleged perpetrators an easier defense. They could claim, for instance, that their actions were motivated by strategic wartime necessity, not a desire to destroy a specific group. Proving the specific intent to destroy a group is often extremely difficult. 

Another challenge has to do with politics. Countries or groups can label events as genocide to justify certain actions. (For instance, a government could claim it is attacking another country to stop a genocide.) Countries could also avoid calling events genocide to dodge consequences. (For instance, they could want to prevent damaging relations with another country, evade pressure to impose sanctions, or send in troops.) 

For those reasons, different countries and organizations often have different views on what events can be classified as a genocide. 

But just because something doesn’t meet the legal definition of genocide doesn’t mean it isn’t a crime. There are other ways of defining mass killing. Some atrocities that resemble genocide can prove to be distinct under international law or common usage.  

Crimes Against Humanity: Defined as a systematic attack against a civilian population, this crime includes acts like murder, extermination, torture, enslavement, and rape. Unlike genocide, such crimes do not have to target a specific identity group—nor do they require proving specific intent. 

Ethnic Cleansing: Although not defined under international law, this crime implies the removal of a civilian population from a certain geographical area. It sometimes falls under the Genocide Convention. 

Willful Killing: Designated as a war crime, this act involves killing any group protected under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, such as civilians not taking part in military action, or wounded or detained soldiers. 

The term “atrocity crimes” is commonly employed to describe situations that may be genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and/or aggression without having to establish which specific crime was committed by an individual or nation, which often only a court of law can do. 

How is genocide prosecuted?

Under the Genocide Convention, countries are obligated to prevent and prosecute genocide. Over 150 countries have ratified the treaty. But even countries that have not are still bound by its principles. That’s because the crime of genocide is considered a customary law that applies to all countries. And genocide, along with other crimes against humanity, falls under a principle known as universal jurisdiction, meaning that any country can prosecute it no matter where it occurs. Germany, for example, has convicted members of the self-proclaimed Islamic State for genocide against the Yazidis, a religious group based in parts of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. 

In many cases, however, enforcing international law on genocide has proven difficult. 

The challenge has been reaching an agreement that genocide has occurred. The Genocide Convention didn’t set up a court to prosecute the crime, nor did it create a place where crimes could be presented for others to hear. It was not until the 1990s that the United Nations acted to create two special ad hoc tribunals to investigate allegations in specified situations of atrocity crimes (in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda) and hear individual cases. Doing so required agreement from the UN Security Council, which thereafter reached persistent gridlock on important issues, including international criminal justice.   

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): The ICTY was formed in 1993 to investigate atrocities that occurred during a civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina following its independence from the former Yugoslavia. During the war, which killed about one hundred thousand people and displaced more than two million, Bosnian Serbs targeted the country’s Muslim population. In the town of Srebrenica, which UN peacekeepers had been designated a safe zone, Bosnian Serb forces massacred up to eight thousand Muslim men and boys in the span of one week. 

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR): The ICTR was formed in 1994 to address the Rwandan genocide. Between April and July of that year, officials, soldiers, and civilians of the Hutu ethnic group ordered and carried out the mass killing of some eight hundred thousand civilians, mostly members of the Tutsi ethnic group. 

Both international tribunals ruled that genocides had occurred. In the decades since, those tribunals convicted more than one hundred fifty individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and/or war crimes. In a pathbreaking trial, former politician Jean-Paul Akayesu was convicted by the ICTR in 1998 for his role in the Rwandan genocide. Akayesu’s case represents the first time in history that an international court delivered a verdict on the crime of genocide. 

The tribunals proved that prosecuting genocide was possible. But the world still lacked a permanent institution to address similar crimes. In 1998, over one hundred countries signed the Rome Statute to set up an international court that could hear future cases. The statute created the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has the power to try individuals accused of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression. Unlike the special ad hoc tribunals, the ICC is independent from the UN system. It does not need authorization from a potentially gridlocked Security Council to act. 

 Countries also have another option when pursuing legal action on genocide: the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Unlike the ICC, the ICJ handles disputes between countries themselves. Therefore, it’s not just individuals who can be held accountable for genocide. Although a country can’t be criminally charged, it can be held responsible for perpetrating or failing to stop a genocide. If a country fails to uphold its obligations under the Genocide Convention, another country that is party to the Genocide Convention can submit a case to the ICJ. 

Still, challenges remain. The ICC’s reach is largely limited to the more than one hundred twenty countries that have ratified the Rome Statute. Dozens of countries, including the United States, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and Sudan, have not done so. 

Some countries cooperate with the ICC despite not being party to its founding treaty; others have refused to comply with arrest warrants for individuals. Meanwhile, the ICJ has limited power to enforce its rulings. Finding a country responsible for violating the Genocide Convention carries symbolic weight, but it does not necessarily lead to real consequences. 

Is genocide happening today?

Genocide remains one of the most contentious issues in international law and politics. It continues to be among the most difficult international crimes to define and enforce. The ICC and ICJ have successfully ruled on international crimes and other human rights issues, but the Rwanda and former Yugoslavia tribunals remain the only instances of successful international legal judgments against individuals on the crime of genocide, although domestic courts in Cambodia and Guatemala have also convicted individuals of genocide in recent years. The ICJ ultimately found the nation of Serbia responsible for failing to prevent and, later on, enact punishments for the crime of genocide following the events at Srebrenica in 1995. 

Human rights groups and individual governments have called several ongoing conflicts genocides. Some countries have submitted their claims to the ICJ for judgment. 

Sudan: Between 2003 and 2005, Sudanese forces and an allied Arab militia called the Janjaweed killed roughly three hundred thousand people, and the ICC indicted Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir on genocide charges in 2009, the first time the court had charged an individual with the crime. After the civil war erupted in 2023, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—successors to the Janjaweed—again targeted those same communities. The United States declared a second genocide in January 2025, and a 2026 UN fact-finding mission also concluded that RSF atrocities amounted to genocide.  

China: China has been accused of genocide against the Muslim Uyghur community in the Xinjiang Province since 2014. Journalists, law experts, and independent tribunals point to systematic attempts by the Chinese government to suppress Uyghur culture, detain Uyghur people, and implement coercive birth control. 

Myanmar: Myanmar military forces have been accused of conducting a genocidal campaign of killings, rapes, and arson against the country’s Rohingya Muslims. In 2017, the attacks caused more than 750,000 Rohingya to flee the country. The case was officially brought to the ICJ by Gambia (Gambia v. Myanmar). The ICJ has yet to issue a final judgment. 

Israel: Israeli military operations in response to the deadly Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, have prompted several human rights groups to allege that the country has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a claim that Israel’s government strongly rejects. South Africa, joined by several countries, submitted a legal case to the ICJ (South Africa v. Israel) in 2023, accusing Israel of genocide. The ICJ has said that any ruling is unlikely before 2027.