ABSTRACT
Three years after the end of the Second World War, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the General Assembly on December 9, 1948 in Paris. A day later, the same Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Genocide, or more specifically, responses to the horrors of the Holocaust, played a key role in the international community’s turn towards human rights in the second half of the twentieth century. Defined as the attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part, the concept of genocide was comparative from the start. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in 1944, cited the Armenian genocide as evidence of such an attempt, and sadly, by the end of the century, there would be several more examples across different continents, including genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
