The Genocide Convention and the politics of genocide non-prevention

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention) was adopted by the General Assembly sixty-five years ago. Following the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, the Genocide Convention's primary object and purpose was the eradication of the crime through its prevention. Numerous cases of genocide have been committed since the Convention entered into force in 1951, betraying the hope that the Convention would eradicate the world of this `odious scourge'. This begged the question: why, despite its universal condemnation and international legal prohibition, has genocide continued to be perpetrated and, in particular, why has the international community failed to take the necessary measures to prevent it?;An analysis of the text of the Genocide Convention and the scholarly literature revealed that the Convention includes weaknesses that diminish its preventive efficacy. Because the Genocide Convention evolved through a negotiating process that produced three formal drafts of the convention, the final draft was compared to the previous two to determine whether the identified weaknesses originated in the initial draft or were negotiated into the adopted text. Only one of the identified weaknesses was present in the initial draft. These findings supported my thesis that the Genocide Convention's preventive efficacy was intentionally weakened, while also raising the question of whether the five permanent members of the Security Council had other motives when they introduced these changes to the Genocide Convention.;Why would the negotiating parties, the permanent members of the Security Council chief among them, actively work to weaken components of the draft convention? After reviewing the scholarly literature and taking into account the historical context within which the treaty was being negotiated, I concluded that the negotiating parties privileged considerations of national interest and state sovereignty rights over the development of a treaty capable of achieving the full international prohibition of genocide. The permanent members worked to ensure that they would not be implicated in the commission of genocide and that the Genocide Convention could not be used to justify interference in their internal affairs.;The purposeful weakening of the Genocide Convention's preventive efficacy, while based in plausible reasons for doing so, demonstrates a lack of commitment to the prevention of genocide. Collectively, the weaknesses combine to relegate the Genocide Convention to a form of symbolic legislation. Because there have been multiple failed attempts to amend the Genocide Convention, the future of genocide prevention likely lies elsewhere. Three recent developments in international law provide some promise for the future. The development of the Responsibility to Protect, the establishment of the International Criminal Court, and the International Court of Justice's ruling in the case of Bosnia v. Serbia, were analyzed to determine their potential to improve on the record of genocide prevention. It was concluded that each offers promise and each contains practical limitations.