Human Rights Abuses

The organization Genocide Watch defines three levels of genocide alerts.

"A Genocide Watch is declared when there are signs of the early stages of the genocidal process."

"A Genocide Warning is called when the genocidal process has reached the stages of preparation by perpetrators and persecution of a targeted group."

"A Genocide Emergency is declared when the genocidal process has reached the stage of genocidal massacres and other acts of genocide."

The term “genocide” was first coined by Raphäel Lemkin, a Polish Lawyer, in 1944. This was both in response to the Holocaust and prior instances of systematic murders against a targeted group. Lemkin led the campaign to have genocide recognized as an international crime; it was first recognized as such by the United Nations General Assembly in 1946.

The definition of genocide, as declared by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, is as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

  1. Killing members of the group;
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Information collected from United Nations: Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect