Tobias Henze

The UN genocide convention: An empty promise to prevent genocides after 1945? Tobias Henze

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: International Organisations, grade: 8.0, Maastricht University, language: English, abstract: The hybrid term genocide was modeled by Raphael Lemkin and used for the first time in his book "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress" (1944) and sought to describe the cruelties and mass murdering committed by the Nazis in the Second World War. Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who himself was persecuted by the Nazi system, thereby created "a new term and a new conception for [...] the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" (Lemkin, 1944, p. 79). A term that henceforward was used in order to depict the "crime of crimes" (Schabas, 2008a, p. 4), crimes that could not have been named before.