- Person
- Raphael Lemkin
- Lived
- 1900–1959
- Field
- International law
- From
- Polish-American
The story
Raphael Lemkin was born on 24 June 1900 in the village of Bezwodne, then in the Grodno province of the Russian Empire and today in Belarus. He grew up in a Polish Jewish family on a farm near Wolkowysk, where his mother, a painter and linguist with a large library, schooled him and his brothers at home. From childhood he was fascinated by the history of persecution. He questioned his mother about the sack of Carthage, the Mongol invasions and the persecution of the Huguenots, and at 12 he was gripped by the scene in Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel Quo Vadis in which Nero throws Christians to the lions.
The First World War brought violence to his own door. Fighting between Russian and German troops destroyed the family home, soldiers seized their crops and animals, and his brother Samuel died of pneumonia and malnutrition while the family sheltered in a forest. Lemkin came to see the suffering of the Jews of eastern Poland as part of a much larger pattern of cruelty against groups stretching back through history.
As a young student he learned of the Ottoman Empire's destruction of the Armenians during that war, and he was deeply disturbed that no international law existed to charge and punish those who organised it. In 1921 he read about the Berlin trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian whose family had been killed in the genocide and who had shot Talaat Pasha, its chief architect. A German court acquitted Tehlirian. Lemkin asked his professor, Juliusz Makarewicz, why Talaat himself could not have been put on trial for his crimes.
The professor answered that state sovereignty allowed governments to run their internal affairs as they saw fit, comparing the situation to a farmer who kills his own chickens: if anyone interferes, they are trespassing. Lemkin replied, "But the Armenians are not chickens." He concluded that sovereignty "cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people".
That exchange set the course of his life. He studied philosophy at Heidelberg, returned to Lwów to study law in 1926, and became a prosecutor in Warsaw. In 1933 he proposed to an international conference in Madrid that the destruction of groups be made a crime. In 1944 he coined the word "genocide", and in 1948 the United Nations adopted the convention he had fought for. The question a student once put to his teacher is now answered in international law: no government has the right to destroy a people.
Why it matters
Lemkin's refusal to accept that governments could murder their own people with impunity became the moral foundation of modern international criminal law.
About Raphael Lemkin
Polish-Jewish jurist who coined the word “genocide” in 1944 and campaigned almost single-handedly until the United Nations outlawed the crime in 1948.
More about Raphael Lemkin
- Raphael Lemkin advised the US war effort on occupied EuropeFrom 1942 Raphael Lemkin worked for the US War Department in Washington and advised the Board of Economic Warfare, bringing his expertise on Nazi occupation law to the Allied cause.
- Raphael Lemkin named genocide and made it a crimeRaphael Lemkin coined the word 'genocide' in 1944, then campaigned until the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention on 9 December 1948.
- Raphael Lemkin collected Nazi decrees as evidenceAfter fleeing Poland in 1939, Raphael Lemkin gathered and analysed Nazi decrees in Stockholm's libraries, uncovering a deliberate plan to destroy whole nations.
- Raphael Lemkin kept campaigning until the treaty took effectAfter the 1948 vote, Raphael Lemkin kept lobbying until the Genocide Convention came into force in 1951, and then helped countries write genocide into their own laws.
- Raphael Lemkin got "genocide" into the Nuremberg indictmentAdvising US chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson in 1945–1946, Raphael Lemkin succeeded in having the new word "genocide" included in the indictment of the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg.
- Raphael Lemkin's idea came of age in the 1990sLittle known when he died in 1959, Raphael Lemkin was rediscovered in the 1990s as international courts began prosecuting genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
- Raphael Lemkin proposed outlawing "barbarity" in 1933In 1933, years before the Holocaust, Raphael Lemkin proposed to an international law conference in Madrid that the destruction of groups be made a crime under international law.
Sources
- Raphael Lemkin Wikipedia
- Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.