Explainer | How to prove genocide in Ukraine-Russia war?
- US President Joe Biden has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of trying to ‘wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian’, calling it genocide
- Under the genocide convention, the crime is trying to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in part or in whole
Washington and Kyiv are accusing Russia of genocide in Ukraine, but the ultimate war crime has a strict legal definition and has rarely been proven in court since it was cemented in humanitarian law after the Holocaust.
What is Genocide?
The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as crimes committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”.
Three cases so far have met international courts’ threshold: the Cambodian Khmer Rouge’s slaughter of minority Cham people and Vietnamese in the 1970s, who were among an estimated 1.7 million dead; the 1994 mass killing of Tutsis in Rwanda that left 800,000 dead; and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Bosnia.
Criminal acts comprising genocide include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, creating conditions calculated to destroy them, preventing births, or forcibly transferring children to other groups.
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What must prosecutors do?
