The Armenian Genocide and the Development of International Law

Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide

The Armenian Genocide influenced the development of the modern legal concept of genocide.

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, became deeply concerned with the destruction of national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups.

The Armenian case helped shape his understanding of the need for international legal protection against the deliberate destruction of human communities.

In 1944, Lemkin introduced the word genocide in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.

The term combined the Greek genos, referring to a group or people, with the Latin-derived suffix -cide, meaning killing.

Lemkin's work contributed to the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.

The Genocide Convention

The 1948 convention defines genocide through specified acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.

These acts include killing group members, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children.

The historical record of the Armenian Genocide includes conduct corresponding to several of these categories.

Although the convention was adopted decades after the events of 1915, historians and genocide scholars use its definition to assess earlier atrocities.

The Armenian Genocide is one of the central historical cases studied in the field of comparative genocide research.