Genocide as a Neglected Topic in Criminal Justice and Criminology - Essay Example

Other related criminal acts cover the criminal justice system locally or internationally seems to show a lack of enthusiasm, if such a word is possible, in creating stricter guidelines and punishments when it comes to genocide as compared to how they are, for example, in improving rules concerning other criminal activities.

Genocide is a word used by the late Jewish Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin [Balakian, 2013] to describe what the Nazis did to the Jews. Later on, it was further defined by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as any of several listed acts conducted with an intent to destroy, partially or completely, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group (Akhavan 2007). Genocide was an evil that took the lives of countless innocent Jewish adults and children. Unfortunately, during that time the criminal system did not have set laws to punish mass killings. The ones accountable were just punished for criminal acts about international armed conflict.

The carefully planned execution of the Jews by the Nazi soldiers in the Holocaust is a prime example of genocide. Unfortunately, those responsible for the killings were not charged for genocide as the term did not even exist in that period. Following its establishment as an international crime, the act of genocide reappeared in history only decades later, during the Bosnian conflict to be more specific. This was the time to see criminal justice make a stand on genocide based on the definition set during the Convention. Unluckily for the victims, their deaths have remained dishonored as those left behind are divided as to whether or not the acts fall under the definition of genocide (Cooke-Welling, 2012). This is where criminal justice appears to have neglected genocide.

When it had mattered the most, the criminal justice system is still trying to decide on whether the ethnic cleansing that happened in many parts of Bosnia can be considered genocide according to the established definition. Currently, only the killings in Srebrenica have been ruled as genocide, but this has been met with contradiction since the massacres only involved Muslim males and not females (Toal & Dahlman, 2011).

Genocide is indeed a delicate and extremely serious matter as it involves the lives of thousands of people. Atrocities like this should be handled with an iron fist. The criminal justice system needs to revisit the rules on genocide, taking into consideration all the changes in societies since the Bosnian war. If revisions are needed, proponents of the law should make these adjustments so that the law on genocide will be encompassing and leave no room for misinterpretation since doing so would mean injustice for the countless victims.