The term ‘genocide’ appears everywhere today – on protest banners, university campuses, graffiti, and social media. It functions both as a legal term with a strict definition in international criminal law and as a rhetorical device carrying unique disapprobation. ‘The crime of crimes’, genocide carries a stigma that its predecessor ‘crimes against humanity’ never achieved. To understand this power, we must examine the story of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the term.

Before the Second World War, Lemkin was troubled by the legal challenges posed by mass atrocities such as the killing of Armenians by Ottoman authorities and pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe. He identified two critical problems: the absence of a legal definition for mass killings, which prevented prosecution, and the doctrine of state sovereignty, which shielded rulers who committed atrocities against their own citizens. One of Lemkin’s professors dismissively told him: ‘Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them, and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing.’

In September 1939, Lemkin fled Poland as Nazi and Soviet forces invaded, eventually finding refuge at Duke University in the United States. Many of his relatives who remained in Eastern Europe were murdered by the Germans. In America, Lemkin wrote Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), meticulously detailing the consequences of German conquest and occupation. To account for the persecution of groups like Poles and Jews, rather than just individuals, Lemkin created the term ‘genocide’, combining the Greek word ‘genos’ (race or people) with the Latin suffix ‘-caedo’ (act of killing).

Lemkin defined genocide as ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group’ through various means, including the disintegration of political and social institutions, culture, language, religion, and economic existence. In essence, genocide was an atrocity committed against individuals as members of a group with the intent to destroy that group. When Winston Churchill referred to the mass killings of Jews as a ‘crime without a name’, Lemkin had provided that name.

Believing his neologism had momentous legal significance, Lemkin sent his work to Robert H. Jackson, who was preparing the international military tribunal for Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. Despite Lemkin’s persistent lobbying, genocide was only briefly mentioned in the Nuremberg Indictment under ‘War Crimes’ as ‘the extermination of racial and national groups’. The final judgment did not mention genocide at all, leaving Lemkin bitterly disappointed. In his words: ‘the Allies decided a case in Nuremberg against a past Hitler – but refused to envisage future Hitlers’. To prevent and punish ‘future Hitlers’ would require making genocide an international crime, enshrined in an international treaty.

The formerly Allied powers – the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom – were united in their hostility to a new law that might indict their own past and future actions. Nevertheless, ‘The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ was formally adopted on 9 December 1948, largely due to support from smaller UN member nations, including several Arab countries. The Convention came into force two years later, though the United States, Soviet Union, and Great Britain would delay ratification for years or decades.

Lemkin’s original draft did not survive intact. British delegates feared the new crime might be used to prosecute colonial administrators; Americans worried about the treatment of African Americans; and Soviet delegates campaigned aggressively against the inclusion of ‘political groups’. They insisted that crimes committed for political motives ‘belong to a special type of crime… and had nothing to do with race or tribe’. Stalin reportedly read every draft to ensure references to political groups were removed.

The ratified Convention defines genocide as acts ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. This definition contains significant legal challenges. Prosecutors must prove not only that the perpetrator intended harm, but did so specifically to eliminate the victim’s group – what lawyers call ‘dolus specialis’ or special intent.

The exclusion of political groups means, to take just one egregious example, that hundreds of thousands of members of the Indonesian communist party (PKI) murdered by army and paramilitary forces in Indonesia in 1965 were not legally victims of genocide. Years later, lawyers and politicians debated whether Tutsis in Rwanda constituted a protected group. In Bosnia, only the Srebrenica massacre has been legally recognised as genocide.

Historians often portray Lemkin, the architect of a new international crime, as saintly, but he opposed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent treaties, fearing they compromised the Genocide Convention. His focus remained on protecting groups rather than individual rights. Before his death in 1959 – alone and impoverished – Lemkin himself came to regret the ‘gutting’ of the Convention and was hard at work researching the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s and the British mass-killing of native Australians in colonial Tasmania.

The legal coining of the word ‘genocide’ and the subsequent Convention sought to punish and prevent an ‘odious scourge’. Yet questions remain about whether the Convention is too flawed to fulfil its promise – does it prevent genocide, or merely provide a means to condemn it after the fact?