Justice & Prosecutions

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.