International Criminal Law - Essay Example

of international crimes is even more complicated because the enforcement of the penal statute is carried out by international bodies against individual persons for acts committed in different countries. Where the international tribunal has jurisdiction, however, it is able to add further definition to a new offense. Such is the case with the crime of genocide. The crime of genocide is a relatively new name for a violent act that had long existed, merely because it has only recently been criminalized.

Quigley2 refers to the crime of genocide consisting of forcible acts that are directed against individual members of a group in a way that threatens a group, although closer examination reveals that there are fine points that qualify acts of genocide. Most such atrocities are coincidental to the occurrence of war. In the twentieth century, the earliest such atrocity was in 1915 when Turkey, fearing that its two million Armenian population would side with its enemies, began deporting this population to Syria and Mesopotamia.

The deportation was particularly brutal and involved several mass executions, during which several hundred Armenians died, prompting Arnold Toynbee to lament it as “the murder of a nation.”3 It took another world war and another three decades before the offense of genocide was conceived. The Germans committed such violence against indiscriminate and countless people that Churchill decried it as “a crime without a name”.4 The term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who escaped Nazi occupation and worked in Washington war intelligence.

The word, as Lemkin himself described, is “a hybrid consisting of the Greek genes meaning race, nation or tribe; and the Latin cide meaning killing5 (e.g. suicide, homicide). After having chronicled the atrocities of the Third Reich, Lemkin had a circumscribed perspective of what would comprise the offense of genocide. He wrote that: “Genocide is effected through a