Definitions of Genocide

UN Definition (1951): In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to
members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to
prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Leo Kuper (1985): Though devastatingly critical of it, Kuper accepts the U.N. definition on the
grounds that it is internationally recognized and may one day become the basis for more effective
preventive action by the United Nations.
Barbara Harff & T.R. Gurr (1988): "By our definition, genocides and politicides are the
promotion and execution of policies by a state or its agents which result in the deaths of a
substantial portion of a group. The difference between genocides and politicides is in the
characteristics by which members of the group are identified by the state. In genocides the
victimized groups are defined primarily in terms of their communal characteristics, i.e., ethnicity,
religion or nationality. In politicides the victim groups are defined primarily in terms of their
hierarchical position or political opposition to the regime and dominant groups.
Ervin Staub (1989): "...an attempt to exterminate a racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, or political
group, either directly through murder or indirectly by creating conditions that lead to the group's
destruction (p. 8).
Frank Chalk & Kurt Jonassohn (1990): ...a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or
other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the
perpetrator (p. 23).
Helen Fein (1993): Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically
destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, though interdiction of the biological and social
reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by
the victim.
Steven Katz (1994): ...the actualization of the intent, however successfully carried out, to
murder in its totality any national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender or economic
group, as these groups are defined by the perpetrator, by whatever means (p. 131).
Israel Charny (1994): in the generic sense is the mass killing of substantial numbers of
human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed
enemy, under conditions of the essential defenselessness and helplessness of the victims.
R.J. Rummel (1997): among other things, the killing of people by a government because of
their indelible group membership (race, ethnicity, religion, language) (p. 31).

Other Related Definitions of Mass Atrocity Crimes

Genocide should be understood as one form of the broader spectrum of mass atrocity crimes. Also
included in this broader spectrum are war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. These
four mass atrocity crimes are outlined in the UNs 2005 World Summit Outcome Document (para. 139).
War crimes, a concept in international law for many centuries, were defined by the 1945 London Charter
of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg as violations of the laws or customs of war,
including, but not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose
of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on
the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or
villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity. War crimes, also defined in the statute that
established the International Criminal Court (ICC), are those violations of the laws of war or
international humanitarian law that incur individual criminal responsibility.
Though perhaps an obvious point, it should be noted that the laws of war only cover atrocities during
armed conflict. They exclude many of the worst abuses of this century, such as Stalins purges and
destruction of the Kulaks, most of the Khmer Rouges terror, and Maos forced collectivizations. While
these atrocities are international crimes, they are not war crimes.
Crimes against humanity, originating in the 1907 Hague Convention preamble, is a more recent
twentieth-century concept. As defined by the Rome Statute of the ICC, crimes against humanity are
particularly odious offenses in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation
or a degradation of one or more human beings. They are not isolated or sporadic events, but are part either
of a government policy (although the perpetrators need not identify themselves with this policy) or of a
wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority. However,
murder, extermination, torture, rape, political, racial, or religious persecution and other inhumane acts
reach the threshold of crimes against humanity only if they are part of a widespread or systematic
practice. Isolated inhumane acts of this nature may constitute grave infringements of human rights, or
depending on the circumstances, war crimes, but may fall short of falling into the category of crimes
under discussion. Article 7.1 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (approved May 25,
2000) stipulates that crimes of humanity are attacks against civilian populations. Crimes against humanity
are distinguishable from genocide in that they do not require an intent to destroy in whole or in part, but
only target a given group and carry out a policy of widespread or systematic violations.
In fact, there are eleven international texts defining crimes against humanity, but they all differ slightly as
to their definition of that crime and its legal elements. However, what all of these definitions have in
common is: (1) they refer to specific acts of violence against persons irrespective of whether the person is
a national or non-national and irrespective of whether these acts are committed in time of war or time of
peace, and (2) these acts must be the product of persecution against an identifiable group of persons
irrespective of the make-up of that group or the purpose of the persecution.
Ethnic cleansing, while having no formal legal definition, can include outright killing, expulsion, acts
of terror designed to encourage flight, and rape when perpetrated either as another form of terrorism or as
a deliberate attempt to change the ethnic composition of the group in question. Similarly, a January
1993 UN report to the Security Council defined ethnic cleansing as rendering an area ethnically
homogenous by using force or intimation to remove persons of given groups from the area. While
certainly popularized by the international media during the Yugoslav Wars, we must keep in mind that
ethnic cleansing is a nebulous blanket term that can cover a host of criminal offenses (already codified
under other mass atrocity crimes) and that ethnic cleansing, itself, is not tied to a specific legal definition.