- Person
- Raphael Lemkin
- Lived
- 1900–1959
- Field
- International law
- From
- Polish-American
The story
In the early 1930s Raphael Lemkin was a rising Polish legal official. He was public prosecutor for the district court of Warsaw and secretary of the committee that codified Poland's penal laws. Since his student days he had been troubled that the organisers of the Ottoman Empire's destruction of the Armenians had never faced justice, and in 1933 news arrived of the Simele massacre of Assyrians in Iraq. He believed international law needed a way to punish the destruction of whole groups.
In 1933 he prepared a paper for the fifth Conference for the Unification of Penal Law in Madrid, a League of Nations-linked meeting on international criminal law. Titled Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Offences Against the Law of Nations, it set out two offences, which he called "barbarity" and "vandalism", and proposed that the crime of barbarity be treated as a crime against international law.
The idea was ahead of its time and found no takers. Worse, it cost Lemkin his career in public service. Under pressure from Poland's Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, over comments made at the Madrid conference, he gave up his official position in 1934 and became a private lawyer in Warsaw.
He did not give up the cause. In Warsaw he attended lectures at the Free Polish University and kept publishing on law, and in 1937 he was a member of the Polish mission to the Fourth Congress on Criminal Law in Paris, where he raised the possibility of defending peace through criminal law. During the 1930s he repeatedly tried to introduce legal safeguards for ethnic, religious and social groups at international forums, without success.
The Madrid proposal was the seed of his later work. About a decade later, as the Nazis were murdering Europe's Jews, he coined the word "genocide", and in 1948 the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention he had championed ever since Madrid. Cultural destruction, which Lemkin always saw as part of genocide, was dropped from the convention's final text, but his broader idea still shapes how scholars and courts think about the crime.
Why it matters
Lemkin's 1933 proposal was the first step in a campaign that ended with genocide recognised as a crime under international 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 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'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.
Sources
- Raphael Lemkin Wikipedia
- Raphael Lemkin Jewish Virtual Library
- 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.