Recent developments

During the first 50 years after its ratification, the genocide convention lacked effective enforcement mechanisms, despite the fact that it contained provisions to enable the UN to enforce it. Although the convention stipulated that persons charged with genocide should be tried before an international penal tribunal or a tribunal of the state in which the crime was committed, no permanent penal tribunal existed at the international level until the early 21st century, and prosecutions at the domestic level were unlikely except in the rare case where a genocidal regime was overthrown and its officials were prosecuted by a successor regime.

The genocide convention was first invoked before an international tribunal in 1993, when the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina argued before the International Court of Justice that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was in breach of its obligations under the convention. During the 1990s the international community became more vigorous in prosecuting alleged crimes of genocide. The UN Security Council established separate tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), both of which contributed to the clarification of the material elements of the offense of genocide as well as of the criteria establishing individual criminal responsibility for its commission. The Rwandan tribunal, for example, stated that genocide included “subjecting a group of people to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes and the reduction of essential medical services below minimum requirement.” It also ruled that “rape and sexual violence constitute genocide…as long as they were committed with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular group, targeted as such”—as was the case in the Rwandan conflict, where the government, dominated by the Hutu ethnic group, organized the mass rape of ethnic Tutsi women by HIV-infected men. On the critical issue of intent, the Yugoslav tribunal also ruled that genocidal intent can be manifest in the persecution of small groups of people as well as large ones. According to the tribunal, such intent

may consist of desiring the extermination of a very large number of the members of the group, in which case it would constitute an intention to destroy a group en masse. However, it may also consist of the desired destruction of a more limited number of persons selected for the impact that their disappearance would have upon the survival of the group as such. This would then constitute an intention to destroy the group “selectively.”

On July 1, 2002, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), adopted in 1998 in Rome by some 120 countries, entered into force. The ICC’s jurisdiction includes the crime of genocide, and the statute adopts the same definition of the offense as found in the genocide convention. The establishment of the ICC—though without the participation of the United States, China, and Russia—was another indication of a growing international consensus in favour of vigorous and concerted efforts to suppress and punish the crime of genocide.

In 2009 the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, president of Sudan, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Darfur region of western Sudan. A second arrest warrant for Bashir, charging him with genocide, was issued in 2010. In 2019 The Gambia filed a lawsuit in the International Court of Justice against Myanmar, charging that country with genocide for its systematic persecution of its Rohingya Muslim minority.