PREVENTING, PUNISHING GENOCIDE DUTY OF ALL HUMANKIND, SAYS SECRETARY-GENERAL ON FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF GENOCIDE CONVENTION
Press Release
SG/SM/6822
OBV/82
PREVENTING, PUNISHING GENOCIDE DUTY OF ALL HUMANKIND, SAYS SECRETARY-GENERAL ON FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF GENOCIDE CONVENTION
19981208 Following is the Message of Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Occasion of the fiftieth Anniversary of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, observed on 9 December 1998:Genocide shaped the founding of the United Nations. The men and women who drafted our Charter did not yet know the terror of possible nuclear holocaust. They did know of the actual Holocaust of Jews and others perpetrated by the Nazi regime. Indeed, the full revelation of that horror, in the spring of 1945, formed the backdrop to the work of the San Francisco Conference. It gave added urgency to the task of building an institution intended not only to preserve world peace, but above all to protect human dignity. Ensuring that genocide could never be repeated became, in many people's eyes, the new world organization's most important mission.
Not surprisingly, therefore, genocide became of the United Nation's first orders of business. On 11 December 1946, the General Assembly declared it "a crime under international law", which "shocks the conscience of mankind". Two years later -- 50 years ago today -- the Assembly adopted the legally-binding Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention entered into force in 1951 and 127 States are now parties to it.
Alas, genocide is a word of our time, too. In this decade, in Africa and the Balkans, we have witnessed mass killings, ethnic cleansing, the systematic use of rape as a weapon of warfare and other horrendous atrocities, visited upon men, women and children solely because of the ethnic, religious or national group to which they belonged. By adopting the Genocide Convention, we had sworn to take action against the perpetrators of such inhumanity wherever it might occur. To our eternal shame, we did not do enough.
Painfully and belatedly, the international community is now moving to fulfil its commitment. Tribunals are at work, trying and convicting some, at least, of those whose crimes will forever disfigure the histories of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. On 2 September 1998, the International Tribunal for Rwanda handed down the first-ever verdict of an international court on a charge of genocide. But the question remains: Will we do better next time? There is sure to be such a test.
Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted the following day, the Genocide Convention points the way towards a world of justice and mutual respect. It establishes individual criminal responsibility -- rulers, public officials and private individuals alike can be held accountable. It applies in peace and war. It even foresaw the creation of an International Criminal Court. In Rome this July, the Statute of such a Court was at last adopted, defining genocide in the very words of the Convention.
Preventing and punishing genocide is never a matter for one nation only. It is the duty of all humankind. Today, as we mark the Convention's fiftieth anniversary, I solemnly call on all States to implement is, and those which have not yet ratified or acceded to it to do so without further delay. Let us all undertake to end this ultimate denial of human rights, and the impunity that has allowed it to continue.
We cannot restore life to the victims. But there is one fitting way to honour their memory. This time we must mean it when we say; "Never again!"