The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 and came into effect in January 1951. It defines and outlaws genocide, as a result of campaigning by Raphael Lemkin who had coined the term some years earlier.
The Convention (in article 2) defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:"
- (a) Killing members of the group;
- (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
All participating countries are required to prevent and punish actions of genocide in war and peacetime.
The first time that the 1948 law was enforced, occurred on September 2, 1998 when a United Nations court found Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a small town in Rwanda, guilty of nine counts of genocide.