Concept in Definition ABC

The genocide it's a international crime that has been classified within the group of crimes against humanity, meanwhile, it consists of the systematic extermination of a social group motivated, either by race issues, politics, religion, ethnicity or nationality, among other options.

International crime against humanity that consists of exterminating a population for religious, ethnic or political reasons

In other words, genocide is in some way a mass murder that many times even involves measures aimed at preventing the births of the group to be eliminated.

Generally, genocide is carried out by a government that is in charge of the power of the state.

Holding for the state

Genocide will always imply a general slaughter of human beings, that is, there is no distinction or discrimination any and has the mission of eliminating them from the face of the earth. Because of this level of damage that it raises and proposes, it needs planning and organization that must be supported, endorsed and sustained by the state.

Beyond the motivations or causes that provoke them, as we have already seen, religious, political, ethnic, among others, they are always perpetrated by a majority with power, authority, organization and structures to do so, and the target is usually a nucleus or group that does not present those characteristics but on the contrary, in comparison, they are much weaker to resist or present battle.

Conditions to be considered genocide

According to what the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of GenocideGenocide means any of these actions: killing of the members of a specific group, serious injury to the physical or mental integrity of the members of that group, intentional submission of the group to certain conditions that lead to total or partial physical destruction, measures aimed at enabling births of that group and the transfer by force of children from that group to another group.

Since genocide is considered an international crime, it may be tried by any competent body in the aforementioned matter.

The United Nations Organization also established through this Convention, which came into force in 1951, that this international crime can be committed both in a conflict formal warlike as in any other context in which peace reigns.

Holocaust and Armenian genocide, two of the most tremendous exponents

Among the best known examples of genocides, because they caused the most deaths, are, on the one hand, the Armenian genocide, developed between the years 1915 and 1917 and in which they died one and a half million people and on the other hand the Holocaust, to be executed by the Nazism and that left a balance of six million dead.

Nazism carried out a brutal system of extermination that began with the arrest of Jews and their confinement in concentration camps, places dark and gloomy that led to certain death due to the forced labor that the detainees were made to perform and also due to the inhumane conditions of captivity. Also, they introduced direct and concrete methods of extermination such as the gas chamber.

In addition, genocide is a type of crime that due to its seriousness never prescribes, that is, it is imprescriptible, therefore, once committed, if the person is not imprisoned as a result of it, it may be at any other opportunity or time, as a consequence of the aforementioned imprescriptibility of the illicit.

Imprescriptible

The legal approach then proposes an absolutely different treatment between common crimes and genocidal crimes, the latter being considered as crimes of It hurts humanity, which precisely never prescribe and to this is added that they cannot be considered as political crimes.

This conception of against humanity would emerge after the fall of Nazism and the horror it generated with the genocide perpetrated against the Jews, popularly known as the Holocaust.

And also in these times is that people begin to speak specifically of genocide, even in the trials that took place after the end of the Second World War, recognized as the Nuremberg trials, in which those responsible for the Jewish genocide were tried and sentenced, this term was cited in several of the accusations and sayings.

Photos: Fotolia - Robert Bradley / piccaya

Topics in Genocide