Raphael Lemkin kept campaigning until the treaty took effect

Person: Raphael Lemkin
Lived: 1900–1959
Field: International law
From: Polish-American

The story

The UN General Assembly's unanimous adoption of the Genocide Convention on 9 December 1948 was the high point of Raphael Lemkin's campaign, but it was only half the battle. Under the treaty's own terms it would take effect only once enough countries had ratified it. Without those ratifications, the new crime he had named in 1944 would remain a promise on paper.

So Lemkin, who had begun lecturing on criminal law at Yale University in 1948, turned to persuading governments one by one. He had no official post at the United Nations or in any government. He worked through sheer personal persistence, enlisting national delegations and influential leaders and urging them to act. The effort paid off. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide entered into force on 12 January 1951, after the twentieth country ratified it.

Lemkin then worked to make the treaty effective inside individual countries. The convention requires states to prevent and punish genocide, and that meant writing the crime into national criminal law. Between 1953 and 1957 he worked directly with representatives of several governments, including Egypt, to outlaw genocide in their domestic penal codes. In 1955 he became a professor of law at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, New Jersey, while continuing the campaign.

It took a heavy personal toll. Lemkin lived his last years in poverty in a New York apartment and died of a heart attack in 1959. His adopted country, the United States, did not ratify the convention during his lifetime. It became a party only in 1988, after Senator William Proxmire had spoken in support of the treaty on every day the Senate was in session between 1967 and 1986.

Lemkin's follow-up work turned a UN resolution into binding international law. Today 154 states are parties to the Genocide Convention. Its definition of genocide has been incorporated into the domestic law of several countries and adopted by international courts, and the International Court of Justice has ruled that the ban on genocide is a fundamental norm that no government may set aside.

Why it matters

Lemkin's tireless follow-up turned a UN resolution into binding international law and pushed nations to make genocide a crime in their own courts.

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.

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Raphael Lemkin

1900–1959 · International law

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