Genocide

This chapter focuses on the particular and unique links between the crime of genocide and ethnicity, nationality, and race. It demonstrates these links first in the legal histories of the crime of genocide. The chapter presents contemporary understandings of genocide that move out of the shadow of the Holocaust and into the landscape of ethnopolitical warfare and conflict. It explores links between ethnicity, ideology, and motivation of perpetrator groups and discusses efforts at prevention and intervention. The contemporary understanding of genocide is inexorably linked to and shaped bythe Holocaust, the murder of the European Jews by the German Nazi-regime between 1939 and 1945. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish–Jewish refugee is credited with coining the term “genocide”, and he conceived of it explicitly as a crime against an ethnic, national, or religious group.No Full Tex

The responsibility to protect in the Asia-Pacific region

In 2005, governments around the world unanimously agreed to the principle of the responsibility to protect (R2P), which holds that all states have a responsibility to protect their populations from genocide and mass atrocities, that the international community should assist them to fulfil this duty, and that the international community should take timely and decisive measures to protect populations from such crimes when their host state fails to do so. Progressing R2P from words to deeds requires international consensus about the principle’s meaning and scope. To achieve a global consensus on this, we need to better understand the position of governments around the world, including in the Asia-Pacific region, which has long been associated with an enduring commitment to a traditional concept of sovereignty. The present article contributes to such an endeavour through its three sections. The first part charts the nature of the international consensus on R2P and examines the UN secretary-general’s approach. The second looks in detail at the positions of the Asia-Pacific region’s governments on the R2P principle. The final part explores the way forward for progressing the R2P principle in the Asia-Pacific region