Truth commissions offer a prospect of facilitating national and personal reconciliation while potentially complementing efforts to promote justice. However, they might also serve as a post-conflict battleground of narrative construction and unwanted compromise.
With the adoption of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, genocide became a crime under international law. The convention also mandates that signatories of the convention incorporate the criminalization of genocide into their own legal code. Although the punitive element of the convention as not invoked until the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda (the ICTY and ICTR, respectively) did so in the late 1990s, a considerable body of jurisprudence has developed both prior to and since then.
According to the Crimes of War Project,
The goal of prevention has had a central role in the study of genocide ever since Raphael Lemkin coined the term. Some early scholarship addressed the Holocaust as a failure of prevention – i.e., asking how it was that the international system allowed it to happen. After the Holocaust, the advent of the genocide convention (formally titled “Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”) seemed to put in place a regime of “Never Again.” Late-twentieth century genocides put to rest the notion that such a regime was self-actualizing. As Samantha Power pointed out i
Common themes or targets of research in genocide studies include: the history of genocide; the factors that contribute to it; the process by which genocide unfolds; the role of different actors within that process, including those of perpetrators, victims, witnesses, bystanders, rescuers and resisters; the role of external third parties who may choose to intervene, permit, prevent, facilitate, or ignore genocide; and the debate over the definition of the term itself.
Scholars can learn many things about genocide from making comparisons across time and space. Broadly, two strategies exist: examining known instances of genocide (or of mass atrocity that possess some characteristics of genocide) to search for commonalities, or examining a broader spectrum of cases to consider why genocide (or mass atrocity) arose in some instances and not in others.
A Crime Against Humanity has been defined as “a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population.” Such crimes include the murder of political or social groups that are unprotected by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.
