Commemorating the Genocide Convention and UDHR

This week marks three important anniversaries in the history of human rights and genocide prevention: On December 8 of last year, the Genocide Prevention Task Force released its report; on December 9, 1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was approved by the UN General Assembly; and on December 10, 1948, now commemorated as International Human Rights Day, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

To commemorate these events, Change.org's Stop Genocide blog will feature a week of posts on the challenges of upholding the principles embodied in the Genocide Convention and the UDHR -- of moving from what Richard Falk calls the "politics of gesture" to effective action to, as the Convention states, "liberate mankind from such an odious scourge." The Genocide Convention mandates international cooperate to "prevent and punish" the crime of genocide, but international commitment to this tenet has persistently fallen rather short over the past 61 years . Genocide and crimes against humanity do not occur in a vacuum, and while the idea of international intervention to stop extreme human suffering may seem fairly straightforward, in reality, moving from ideal to implementation is anything but.

Before diving into these issues, though, here are resources on the three documents from the Stop Genocide page:

• The Stop Genocide "About" page features posts on the development of the definition of genocide, including the Convention.

• Karl Horberg wrote an excellent series of posts on the drafting of the Genocide Convention and the development of international justice for genocide and crimes against humanity.

• Other posts of interest: Last year's two-part reaction to the release of the Task Force report, and a response to critics; and last year's two less-than-optimistic but not hopelessly pessimistic posts on International Human Rights Day.

[Photo by Rita Willaert: Armenian Genocide memorial in Yerevan.]