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Sixty years un genocide convention - New challenges for genocide education
Abstract
The field of genocide education in particular has grown immensely over the past years without much specific research resulting or being sufficiently reflected in the literature. This chapter focuses on the field of genocide education and raises some issues which ought to figure prominently on the agenda of educators working in this field. A classic feature of publications in the field of genocide studies and education is criticism of the UN Genocide Convention: it is considered toothless, held to entail a flawed, if not useless, definition, and it says, according to critics, too little on questions of prevention and intervention. The small Holocaust and Genocide education unit at the Danish Institute for International Studies annually organises outreach events throughout the country for high school students to mark what in Denmark has been called "Auschwitz Day" - that is January 27, the day commemorating the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp. Keywords:genocide education; Holocaust; UN Genocide Convention
... This narrowly defined concept of groups became problematic during proceedings at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The tribunal redefined the idea of these definitive categories stating that group membership, as perceived by the perpetrator, should be accepted as a defining ground (Gaeta, 2011;Mannecke, 2012). Of course, the crime of genocide is by no means equitable to hateful speech. ...
Since the refugee crisis that struck Europe in 2015, hate speech against refugees and migrants has increased significantly, becoming a cause of concern for the United Nations. Although there is no definition of hate speech or xenophobia in international law, dispositions in human rights treaties and soft law provide a mandate for States to protect migrants from hateful speech. By reviewing human rights treaties, documents from treaty bodies and other soft law instruments, this article aims to show that hateful speech targeting migrants should be sanctioned by law, as it falls outside the scope of freedom of expression.
Desde la crisis de refugiados que afecto a Eu-ropa en el 2015, los discursos de odio contra refugiados y migrantes han aumentado significativa-mente, generando preocupación en las Naciones Unidas. A pesar de que no existe una definición en el derecho internacional para los conceptos de discurso de odio o xenofobia, disposiciones en tratados de derechos humanos y en derecho blando indican un deber de los Estados de proteger a migrantes frente a discursos de odio. Haciendo una revisión de tratados de derechos humanos, documentos de organismos emanados de dichos tratados y otros instrumentos de derecho blando, este artículo busca demostrar que el discurso de odio contra migrantes debería ser sancionado por ley, ya que no entra dentro del espectro del derecho a la libertad de expresión.
The term "genocide" has been commonly used, particularly in political dialogue, to describe atrocities of great diversity, magnitude, and character. Yet the prospect of the term's arising in policy making too often imposes an intimidating brake on effective responses. The political use of the term should be separated from its legal definition as a crime of individual responsibility. Governments and international organizations should be liberated to apply the term "genocide" more readily within a political context so as to publicly describe precursors of genocide and react rapidly either to prevent or to stop mass killings or other seeming acts of genocide. They should not be constrained from acting by the necessity of a prior legal finding that the crime of genocide in fact has occurred or is occurring and, once that legal finding has been made, that governments are somehow obligated to use military force in response. There also is a critical need for a new term—"atrocity crimes"—and a new field of international law—atrocity law—to achieve a similar objective, namely, to enable public and academic discourse to describe genocide, crimes against humanity (including ethnic cleansing), and war crimes with a single term that is easily understood by the public and accurately reflects the magnitude and character of the crimes adjudicated before international and hybrid criminal tribunals and of the law being applied by such tribunals, governments, and international organizations. The purpose would be to simplify and yet render more accurate both public dialogue and legal terminology describing genocide and other atrocity crimes.