The history of Rapha'l Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention

This chapter presents an overview of the history of the concept of genocide, the world's first genocide prosecutions at Nuremberg and the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland in 1946, and the efforts to outlaw genocide under the United Nations between 1946 and 1948. Focusing on what genocide meant to Rapha'l Lemkin, the jurist who coined the word, this chapter discusses how the definition of genocide changed during the UN negotiations, and the implications this has for international law and global efforts to build a more peaceful world. This chapter covers Lemkin's early work in the 1920s and 1930s on the Soviet penal code and shows how Lemkin's work on Soviet terror and nationalities conflict influenced his writings on genocide, which he developed in the 1940s as the atrocities we now call the Holocaust unfolded in Europe. The chapter also presents an overview of the politics of the UN drafting process. Finally, the chapter discusses the importance of women's NGOs in advocating for the genocide convention between 1946 and 1948, and the UN's failure to include acts of sexual violence as acts of genocide in the final draft of the UN Genocide Convention.