- Person
- Raphael Lemkin
- Lived
- 1900–1959
- Field
- International law
- From
- Polish-American
The story
Raphael Lemkin spent the last years of his life in poverty in a New York apartment, still campaigning for the Genocide Convention he had championed. He died of a heart attack in New York in 1959, at the age of 59. Only a few people attended his funeral at Riverside Church, and he was buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens. He left unfinished several works, including an Introduction to the Study of Genocide and an ambitious three-volume History of Genocide with seventy planned chapters.
He believed his efforts had failed. The United States had not ratified the convention, and he wrote that "the rain of my work fell on a fallow plain". For decades no international court applied the treaty, and Lemkin was little known outside a small circle of scholars and activists.
That changed in the 1990s. In response to the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the UN Security Council set up international tribunals to try those responsible. In November 1994 it established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which later sat in Arusha, Tanzania. Its first trial, of Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former mayor of the Rwandan commune of Taba, began in 1997. On 2 September 1998 the tribunal found him guilty of genocide. It was the first time an international court had interpreted and applied the 1948 Genocide Convention, and the judges also held that rape could be an act of genocide. In the former Yugoslavia, the international tribunal found that Bosnian Serb forces had committed genocide at Srebrenica in 1995.
As these prosecutions went forward, genocide came to be recognised as the worst of all crimes, and Lemkin's name returned to public view. On the 50th anniversary of the convention's entry into force, the UN Secretary-General honoured him as "an inspiring example of moral engagement". He has since been the subject of plays, including Lemkin's House by Catherine Filloux, and of the 2014 documentary Watchers of the Sky.
The legal tools he fought for are now in regular use. The definition of genocide he helped write has been adopted by international courts, including the International Criminal Court, and his convention allows cases to be brought before the International Court of Justice.
Why it matters
The international courts that tried genocide in the 1990s rested on Lemkin's word and his convention, bringing justice to victims he never lived to see.
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 asked why mass murderers went unpunishedAs a young student, Raphael Lemkin challenged the idea that state sovereignty let governments kill their own people, replying to his professor: "But the Armenians are not chickens."
- 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 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
- Genocide Convention Wikipedia
- Jean-Paul Akayesu Wikipedia
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.