75 Years of the Genocide Convention: Successes and Failures

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On April 29, 1945, American soldiers from the 42nd “Rainbow” Division passed through the gates of a German military compound outside the Bavarian town of Dachau. The soldiers expected to find a training facility or a prisoner-of-war camp. They could not have imagined the horrors they would find behind those gates. Instead of a training site, they had walked into Germany’s first concentration camp, one that became a model for all that followed.¹

The soldiers first encountered an overpowering odor that they could not identify. But quickly, they found “piles of naked corpses, their skin stretched tight across impossibly malnourished bodies.”² When interviewed later, G.I. after G.I., trying to make sense of what they had seen, described the dead bodies being “stacked like cordwood.”³ They also found what they called the “death train,” forty train cars filled with thousands of decomposing bodies.⁴ There to greet the soldiers were 32,000 surviving prisoners, most diseased or deeply malnourished. They looked like “walking skeletons.”⁵

The men who witnessed these things were overwhelmed. Some broke down in uncontrolled sobbing. Others lashed out in rage, gunning down some German officers who tried to surrender.⁶ The witnesses would never be the same.

And the world would never be the same. As reports of Dachau and many other liberated camps spread and the reality of the Holocaust and other atrocities became known, the world united around a core conviction: never again. What had just occurred in Europe and Asia must never be allowed to happen again. The world’s experience of the horrors of World War II and its revulsion at the Holocaust and other atrocities prompted the birth of the modern human rights movement.⁷ It also prompted the birth of modern international criminal law, including the prosecution of individuals for the crime of genocide.

After the formation of the United Nations (U.N.) and ratification of the U.N. Charter, the first human rights treaty adopted by the U.N. General Assembly was the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“Genocide Convention”).⁸ On December 9, we marked the 75th anniversary of this landmark document.

This article tells the story of the Genocide Convention and the impact that it has had. It is a story of both successes and failures. Sadly, what was never to happen again has happened again—multiple times. The article ends by urging that the only way to prevent genocide truly is to embrace a Christian view of human nature.

The term genocide is relatively new. Its first use was by Raphael Lemkin in 1944.⁹ Lemkin was a lawyer and a Polish Jew who had escaped the Holocaust and emigrated to the United States. He was convinced that the world needed a word to describe what had taken place in the Holocaust—a word that would galvanize both attention and action.¹⁰

When we hear “genocide,” we tend to think of the large-scale killing of human beings. But it is a more focused term than that. “Genocide” refers to specific acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.¹¹ Those acts can include killing, but they can also include rape, preventing births within a group, or forcibly transferring children of that group to another group.¹²

The most distinctive feature of genocide is its intent—to destroy a group—in whole or in part.¹³ And it is not just any group. That group must be a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. It can't be a political group. If individuals or entities seek to destroy members of a political party or a group holding a particular political position, it would not be genocide.

Thus, when Serbian Orthodox Christians killed and raped tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims,¹⁴ they committed genocide. But when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia killed 1.7 million fellow Cambodians,¹⁵ they likely did not commit genocide under the term’s precise definition. Their acts were still evil and criminal—they were crimes against humanity—but they were not genocide under the word’s very precise meaning.

While the term genocide is relatively new, the act of genocide is not. Sadly, history offers many examples of genocides before the Holocaust. Here are two examples from the classical period.

In 146 B.C., during the third Punic War, Rome conquered its great rival, Carthage. Rome determined that Carthage would never challenge it again and destroyed Carthage completely. Roman soldiers went from house to house, killing everyone. Of Carthage’s population of between 100,000 and 200,000 citizens, only 30,000–50,000 survived. The Romans sold them as slaves.¹⁶ The historian Polybius noted, “‘The destruction of the Carthaginians was immediate and total’ so that no Carthaginians were left even to express their remorse.”¹⁷

Nearly three centuries earlier, Athenian soldiers committed genocide against the people of Melos, an island that had remained neutral during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. The soldiers killed all of Melos’ men and sold the women and children as slaves. They sought to “destroy the Melians as a group and a culture.”¹⁸

The Genocide Convention attempts to ensure that acts like those seen in the Holocaust, as well as in Carthage and Melos, would never happen again. The United Nations General Assembly approved the Convention on December 9, 1948,¹⁹ a day before the same body approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Together, the documents insisted that there are universal principles of truth and justice, among which all humans have inherent dignity and worth.

The Convention contains nineteen articles. Some are merely procedural, setting forth things like the ratification procedure, official text languages, and where the original document would be deposited.

Some of the most important substantive provisions are in articles 1 through 4.

The first article contains two key features. First, it makes genocide a crime.²⁰ Thus, not only does it declare genocide to be wrong or a human rights violation, the Convention sets forth that individuals may be held criminally responsible for committing genocide.

Second, genocide is a crime that states parties to the Convention undertake to prevent and punish.²¹ Ratifying states do not merely accept the notion that genocide is evil. They commit themselves to doing something about it. Ironically, this obligation to act is one reason why nations are often hesitant to declare that acts of atrocity constitute genocide: they might be required to take action in response. This phenomenon explains why the United States was so slow to acknowledge the 1994 genocide that killed over 800,000 people in Rwanda.²² Determined to avoid military intervention in another African nation after the disastrous 1993 mission to Somalia (captured in the film Black Hawk Down), the Clinton Administration went to great—sometimes even absurd²³—lengths to avoid characterizing the situation in Rwanda as genocide.

The second article sets forth three essential elements that form the core of the crime of genocide.

Genocide occurs only when the perpetrator targets a particular “national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.”²⁴ He or she must go after the group “as such,” meaning there must be an intent to target the group because of who they are.²⁵

The following acts satisfy the conduct (in legal terms, the actus reus) requirement of the crime:

1. Killing members of the group;

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.²⁶

The intention that must accompany these actions (in legal terms, the mens rea) is what most sets genocide apart from other crimes. It is not sufficient that the perpetrator intentionally commits the acts described above. He or she must do so with a further intention: “to destroy” the group “in whole or in part.”²⁷

International tribunals have found that if the intention is to destroy only a part of a targeted group, that part must be a meaningful or significant one. One of the most important cases regarding the Bosnian genocide involved what took place in the Bosnian city of Srebrenica. There, Bosnian Serb troops rounded up 7,000 Bosnian Muslim males in and around the town and systematically shot them. Though there were many more Bosnian Muslims than these 7,000, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) determined that they constituted a substantial part of the group, and that this incident was indeed a genocide.²⁸

The third article establishes that there are a variety of modes of engaging in genocide. A perpetrator may be convicted of genocide if he or she commits, attempts to commit, engages in a conspiracy to commit, incites (in a direct and public way), or is complicit in genocide.²⁹

The fourth article declares that anyone can be punished for genocide, including “constitutionally responsible rules, public officials or private individuals.”³⁰

The breadth of this provision was seen in the ICTY’s prosecutions after the Bosnian genocide. The ICTY charged the military leader who masterminded the Srebrenica massacre, Ratko Mladic, and Slobodan Milosevic, President of Serbia. Mladic was convicted of genocide and other crimes.³¹ Milosevic died four years into his trial, which was never completed.³² Similarly, the International Criminal Court (ICC) charged Sudan’s former president, Omar Al Bashir, with genocide, though he is still not in custody.³³

The Genocide Convention has been successful in several ways. First, the nations of the world have embraced it. Of the 193 United Nations member states, 153 nations, including the United States, have ratified the Genocide Convention.³⁴ In a fractious world community, 153 ratifications constitute an overwhelming consensus that genocide is a crime and that nations must act to prevent and punish it.

Second, the Genocide Convention has been embraced in national laws. Indeed, as we have seen, one of the convention’s requirements is that ratifying nations criminalize genocide in domestic law.³⁵ The United States has done so.³⁶

Third, the Genocide Convention has played a vital role in international criminal prosecutions. Though various international tribunals (applying many different legal provisions) have been created since 1948, the Genocide Convention is the law regarding genocide. Its key elements—definition, actus reus, mens rea—have been incorporated into the international conventions that have led to numerous prosecutions. Those include the statutes for the ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the ICC.³⁷

The first person ever convicted by an international tribunal for genocide was Rwandan Jean Paul Akayesu. Akayesu was a teacher who became the mayor of Taba. During the 1994 genocide, he supervised the killings of Tutsis in his town. He gave death lists to other Hutus and ordered house-to-house searches for Tutsis. The ICTR convicted him of genocide, among other crimes, and sentenced him to life in prison.³⁸ The elements of the crime applied by the ICTR came directly from the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Unfortunately, despite these successes, genocide has continued to take place. The Genocide Convention has played a vital role in declaring and upholding justice. But it has not been sufficient to keep our commitment of “never again.” Indeed, it has failed to prevent multiple genocides that have killed hundreds of thousands of people. Here are some of the most prominent.

The Bosnian genocide occurred as the former Yugoslavia broke into several independent nations in the wake of the fall of communism. Among the regions that declared independence was Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1991, Bosnia had a diverse population made up of three major ethnic groups: Bosniak (predominantly Muslim) 44%, Serb (predominantly Orthodox Christian) 31%, and Croat (predominantly Roman Catholic) 17%.³⁹ Bosnian Serbs opposed the nation’s declaration of independence in April of 1992. They wished to remain part of Yugoslavia, which had a majority Serb population. Supported by Yugoslavian national forces, Bosnian Serbs fought against the Bosnian government. They also sought to rid the region of its Bosniak and Croat minorities.

The brutal war took the lives of an estimated 100,000 individuals, 80% of whom were Bosniaks.⁴⁰ Bosnian Serbs also raped 10,000 to 60,000 women.⁴¹ They did so as an act of genocide. A UN special rapporteur observed that rape was “intended to humiliate, shame, degrade and terrify the entire ethnic [Bosniak] group.”⁴² Further, based on the belief that the father determines ethnicity, the Bosnians sought to impregnate Bosniak women with “Serbian” babies. Perpetrators raped some women repeatedly until they became pregnant.⁴³

Perhaps the event that most shocked and horrified the world was the massacre of Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica, referenced above. Srebrenica was a town of about 40,000 people in eastern Bosnia, most of whom were Bosniak. The United Nations deployed troops to the area, declaring Srebrenica and parts of the neighboring region a safe zone. But those troops did nothing when, on July 16, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces bused 7,000 Bosniak men to a nearby farm, lined them up with their backs to the soldiers, and shot them, hundreds at a time.⁴⁴

While the war and genocide were taking place in Bosnia, another genocide occurred in the East African nation of Rwanda. There, in a mere 100 days, Rwandan Hutus slaughtered over 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis (and moderate Hutus viewed as Tutsi sympathizers).⁴⁵ The genocide was organized and led by armed forces and Hutu militia groups, but it really involved the whole population. Shockingly, perhaps 200,000 Rwandans took part in the killings.⁴⁶ Ordinary citizens executed neighbors, friends, and even family members. And they did so using nail-studded clubs and machetes.

As in Bosnia, the perpetrators also used rape as an instrument of genocide. The United Nations estimates that perpetrators raped up to half a million women during the 100 days.⁴⁷ Indeed, Professor Lisa Sharlach reports that most women between the ages of 13 and 50 in the capital city of Kigali who survived the genocide were rape victims.⁴⁸ How was rape viewed as an act of genocide? As in Bosnia, the rapists intended to terrify their Tutsi victims and interfere with normal childbearing. In addition, like the Serbs, the Hutus believed that ethnicity comes from the father, so by impregnating Tutsi women, they believed they were creating Hutu babies. But, in Rwanda, there was a third motivation. “[T]he deliberate transmission of HIV was a unique component of rape as genocide in Rwanda. Survivors report that Hutu men diagnosed with HIV raped Tutsi women during the civil war, then told the women that they would die slowly and gruelingly from AIDS.”⁴⁹

Another genocide in Africa began in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2003. That year, two rebel groups (the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement (SLMA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)) rose against the Sudanese government. This prompted a civil war between African tribal groups from the south and west of Sudan and government troops from the Arab north supported by Arab militias known as Janjaweed.

Government and Janjaweed forces seized the opportunity provided by war to kill and displace African civilians. They used “scorched-earth tactics”⁵⁰ that wiped out many villages. They deployed air attacks that often targeted civilians gathered in marketplaces, shops, and wells. Ground forces followed up: killing, raping, and torturing civilians. They murdered 200,000 to 400,000 African men, women, and children by 2005.⁵¹ They also displaced 2.5 million people. The number of those killed and displaced amounted to about half of Darfur’s population.⁵²

While the above genocides are the most prominent, they are by no means the only ones that have occurred during the 75 years in which the Genocide Convention has been in force. Indeed, genocide still takes place in our world today.

For example, it is estimated that China has arbitrarily imprisoned over one million Uyghur Muslims and other religious and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang province. There, it has employed torture, forced labor, forced sterilization, and forced abortion, and it has removed children from their families.⁵³ On January 19, 2021, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced:

[A]fter careful examination of the available facts, I have determined that the [People’s Republic of China], under the direction and control of the [Chinese Communist Party], has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang. I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state.⁵⁴

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently made a similar finding regarding Myanmar’s treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority. He found that in 2016 and 2017, the Burmese military engaged in “extreme, large-scale, and widespread” violence and destruction of homes in the Rakhine Province against the Rohingya.⁵⁵ He concluded that the acts constituted genocide and crimes against humanity.⁵⁶

In making these investigations and findings, secretaries Blinken and Pompeo followed in the footsteps of Secretary of State John Kerry, who found that the terrorist group Daesh (ISIS) had committed genocide against Yazidi, Christians, and Shia Muslims in Syria and Iraq in 2014.⁵⁷

Sadly, despite the existence of the Genocide Convention and its near-universal acceptance, genocide continues to occur regularly.

How do we make sense of genocide? What causes humans to seek to destroy groups of their fellow humans? Why, 75 years after the world resolved “never again,” do we look back on more genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, and Myanmar—and see genocide before our eyes in China today?

It is only possible to understand—and combat—genocide by embracing a biblical view of human nature. Scripture tells us that we, as humans, are made in the image of God with worth and dignity.⁵⁸ But we are also marred by sin, the consequence of the fall.⁵⁹

In genocide, we see the deep darkness of the human heart. Rwanda displayed this in a dramatic way. Over just 100 days, 800,000 people were murdered. Over 300 per hour. Over five per minute. Carl Wilkens, an American relief worker who witnessed the genocide, observed: “The average person in Rwanda, they would no sooner kill their neighbor than you or I. But when the killing began by those who were ready to do it, the fear just took a hold of people, and it went like wildfire.”⁶⁰ As many as 200,000 individuals participated in the killings.⁶¹ Neighbor killed neighbor, co-worker killed co-worker, in a most personal way—with machetes and nail-studded clubs. The newsmagazine show Frontline interviewed participants and asked them what prompted them to kill. One responded: “It was as if we were taken over by Satan.”⁶²

Ultimately, individuals, groups, and nations committed genocide because they failed to see certain individuals as having worth and dignity—or even as human at all.

In Germany, Jews were called parasites and disease carriers—leeches, lice, bacteria, or rats—especially rats. As David L. Smith writes in his book Less Than Human, “The Nazis were explicit about the status of their victims. They were Untermenschen—subhumans—and as such, were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It’s wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat. To the Nazis, all the Jews, Gypsies, and others were rats: dangerous, disease-carrying rats.”⁶³

In Rwanda, Tutsis were cockroaches that must be crushed. Hutu political leaders called them “scum.”⁶⁴ At pre-genocide meetings, local leaders described Tutsis as “Devils, horns, hoofs, tails, and all.”⁶⁵ A pro-Hutu radio station played a central role, calling Tutsis “cockroaches,” urging its listeners to destroy them.⁶⁶

In Sudan, the victims were derisively called “black,” “slave,” and “dog.”⁶⁷ They were objects to be cleansed from the land.

Such dehumanization continues today. The State Department determined that the Chinese Communist Party officials referred to the Uyghurs as “malignant tumors” and urged, “you can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one-by-one; you need to spray chemicals to kill them all.”⁶⁸

If we truly want “never again” to mean “Never Again,” we must commit ourselves to valuing all humans as having inherent worth and dignity—as having been made in the image of God. This means not only believing that all humans are made in God’s image but acting accordingly.

Our laws and public policy must stand unequivocally for the inherent dignity and worth of every human being—whether rich, powerful, and healthy; or poor, vulnerable, or disabled. It means protecting the unborn who truly can’t speak for themselves. It means opposing so-called “death with dignity” laws that reflect a view that only some individuals—healthy/non-disabled/without cognitive impairment—have lives worth living. It means treating with care and respect other vulnerable populations among us, such as survivors of human trafficking and those seeking asylum at our southern border.

Valuing all humans as having inherent worth and dignity also means speaking to and about others with honor and respect. The apostle James warned of the dangers in our words. Speaking of the “tongue,” he wrote:

How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. . . . It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. ⁶⁹

He tied his counsel to the doctrine that all humans are made in God’s image: “With it [the tongue] we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.”⁷⁰

James’ warning is as necessary today as it was in the first-century Roman Empire. The temptation to demean others—even to dehumanize them—is still potent in our day. Increasingly, we see it in our politics and our social media exchanges, not just in acts of physical violence. If we wish to prevent genocide, we must commit to seeing every person—even those from whom we most differ or with whom we most profoundly disagree—as an image bearer of God. All are bearers of rights, worth, and dignity.

^*Professor and Executive Director, Center for Global Justice, Regent University School of Law.

¹Dave Roos, The Horrifying Discovery of Dachau Concentration Camp – and Its Liberation by US Troops,History (Dec. 14, 2020), https://www.history.com/news/dachau-concentration-camp-liberation.

²Id.

³Id.

⁴Id.

⁵Id.

⁶Id.

⁷Hurst Hannum et. al., International Human Rights: Problems of Law, Policy, and Practice, 46–47 (6th ed. 2018).

⁸Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Dec. 9, 1948, S. Exec. Doc. O, 81-1 (1949), 78 U.N.T.S. 277 [hereinafter Genocide Convention].

⁹David Luban, Calling Genocide by Its Rightful Name: Lemkin’s Word, Darfur, and the UN Report, 7 Chi. J. Int’l L. 303, 307 (2006).

¹⁰Id. at 307–08.

¹¹Genocide Convention, supra note 8, at art. 2.

¹²Id.

¹³Id.

¹⁴David Luban et al., International and Transnational Criminal Law 1002, 1007 (3d ed. 2019).

¹⁵Adam Taylor, Why the World Should Not Forget Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Wash. Post (Aug. 7, 2014), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/08/07/why-the-world-should-not-forget-khmer-rouge-and-the-killing-fields-of-cambodia/.

¹⁶Gerard Mulligan, Genocide in the Ancient World, Ancient Hist. Encyclopedia (Jan. 27, 2013), https://www.worldhistory.org/article/485/genocide-in-the-ancient-world/ (quoting Polybius, Histories, Bk. XXXVIII, Ch. 3-11).

¹⁷Id.

¹⁸Id.

¹⁹Genocide Convention, supra note 8.

²⁰Id. at art. 1.

²¹Id.

²²Arch Puddington, A Quarter-Century After Rwanda's Genocide, Mass Atrocities Continue to Multiply, Freedom House (Apr. 24, 2019), https://freedomhouse.org/article/quarter-century-after-rwandas-genocide-mass-atrocities-continue-multiply.

²³This phenomenon is illustrated by the following exchange from a press conference with State Department spokesperson Christine Shelley in June 1994, the third month of the genocide: Christine Shelley: We have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred. Alan Elsner (Reuters correspondent): How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide? Christine Shelley: Alan, that’s just not a question that I’m in a position to answer.Alan Elsner: Is it true that the – that you have specific guidance to not use the word “genocide” in isolation, but always to preface it with this – these words “acts of”? Christine Shelley: I have guidance, which – to which I – which I try to use as best as I can. I’m not – I have – there are formulations that we are using that we are trying to be consistent in our use of. Ghosts of Rwanda, “Transcript,” PBS Frontline, April 1, 2004. President Clinton later apologized to the people of Rwanda for the United States’ actions regarding the genocide. Text of Clinton’s Rwanda Speech, CBS News (Mar. 25, 1998), http://www.cbsnews.com/news/text-of-clintons-rwanda-speech/; Bill Clinton: We Could Have Saved 300,000 Lives in Rwanda, CNBC (March 13, 2013), http://www.cnbc.com/id/100546207.

²⁴Genocide Convention, supra note 8, art. 2.

²⁵Luban, supra note 14, at 972.

²⁶Genocide Convention, supra note 8, art. 2.

²⁷Id. In legal terms, genocide is a specific intent crime.

²⁸Prosecutor v. Krstic, Case No. IT-98-33-A, Judgement (ICTY Appeals Chamber 2004).

²⁹Genocide Convention, supra note 8, art. 3.

³⁰Id. art. 4.

³¹United Nations, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Cases, IRMCT, https://www.icty.org/en/cases (choose “Mladic”; then choose “Case Information Sheet”).

³²Id. (choose “Milosevic”; then choose “Case Information Sheet”).

³³Case Information Sheet, The Prosecutor v. Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir, Int’l Criminal Ct., https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/CaseInformationSheets/AlBashirEng.pdf.

³⁴United Nations Treaty Collection, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=IV-1&chapter=4&clang=_en (last visited Dec. 17, 2023). The United States signed the Convention immediately in 1948, but it did not ratify it until 40 years later. Id.

³⁵Genocide Convention, supra note 8, art. 5.

³⁶18 U.S.C. § 1091.

³⁷UN Security Council, Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (as amended on 17 May 2002), 25 May 1993, https://www.refworld.org/docid/3dda28414.html; UN Security Council, Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (as last amended on 13 October 2006), 8 November 1994, https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3952c.html; UN General Assembly, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (last amended 2010), 17 July 1998, ISBN No. 92-9227-227-6, https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3a84.html.

³⁸The Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, Int’l Crimes Database, https://www.internationalcrimesdatabase.org/Case/50/Akayesu/ (last visited Dec. 17, 2023).

³⁹Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1995, The United States Holocaust Mem’l Museum, https://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/cases/bosnia-herzegovina (last visited Dec. 17, 2023).

⁴⁰Id.

⁴¹Lisa Sharlach, Rape as Genocide: Bangladesh, the Former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, 22 New Pol. Sci. 89, 96 (2000).

⁴²Siobhan K. Fisher, Occupation of the Womb: Forced Impregnation as Genocide, 46 Duke L.J. 91, 108 (1996).

⁴³Id. at 106–07. Serb soldiers reportedly raped a 17-year-old girl named Marianna up to 10 times per day, telling her, “Now you will have Serbian babies for the rest of your life.” Id. at 113.

⁴⁴Luban, supra note 14, at 1002, 1007.

⁴⁵United Nations, International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, The Genocide, https://unictr.irmct.org/en/genocide (last visited Dec. 17, 2023).

⁴⁶See Rwandan Genocide of 1994, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Rwanda-genocide-of-1994 (last visited Dec. 17, 2023).

⁴⁷See Sharlach, supra note 41, at 98.

⁴⁸Id.

⁴⁹Id. at 99.

⁵⁰Jennifer Trahan, Why the Killing in Darfur is Genocide, 31 Fordham Int’l L.J. 990, 996 (2008).

⁵¹See id. at 1027.

⁵²See id.

⁵³Determination of the Secretary of State on Atrocities in Xinjiang, U.S. Dep’t of State (Jan. 19, 2021), https://2017-2021.state.gov/determination-of-the-secretary-of-state-on-atrocities-in-xinjiang/index.html.

⁵⁴Id.

⁵⁵Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya in Burma,U.S. Dep’t of State (Mar. 21, 2022), https://www.state.gov/burma-genocide/.

⁵⁶Id.

⁵⁷See Remarks on Daesh and Genocide,U.S. Dep’t of State (Mar. 17, 2016), https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2016/03/254782.htm.

⁵⁸Genesis 1:26–28; Genesis 9:5–6; Psalms 8:4–8; James 3:8–9.

⁵⁹Genesis 3:14–19; Isaiah 64:6; Jeremiah 17:9; Romans 3:9–18; Ephesians 2:1–3.

⁶⁰Ghosts of Rwanda, Interview Carl Wilkens, PBS Frontline (Nov. 19, 2003), http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/interviews/wilkens.html (last visited Dec. 17, 2023).

⁶¹See Rwandan Genocide of 1994, supra note 46.

⁶²Ghosts of Rwanda, Transcript, PBS Frontline, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/etc/script.html (last visited Dec. 17, 2023) (“When Satan is using you, you lose your mind. We were not ourselves. You couldn't be normal and you start butchering people for no reason. We'd been attacked by the devil.”).

⁶³David L. Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others 15 (2011).

⁶⁴Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda 96 (1998).

⁶⁵Id. at 94.

⁶⁶Russell Smith, The Impact of Hate Media in Rwanda, BBC News (Dec. 3, 2002), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3257748.stm.

⁶⁷Emily Wax, We Want to Make a Light Baby, Wash. Post (June 30, 2004), http: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16001-2004Jun29.html.

⁶⁸See Determination of the Secretary of State on Atrocities in Xinjiang, supra note 52.

⁶⁹James 3:5–6, 8.

Jeffrey A. BrauchDecember 30, 2023