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The term is included in the statutes of all the international courts and tribunals (but not the UN- backed Special Court for Sierra Leone), taking the definition from the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” In addition to individual criminal responsibility for genocide, the Genocide Convention also establishes State responsibility—that is, international legal responsibility of the State itself for breaching its obligations under the convention. Parties to the convention can bring a case before the UN’s International Court of Justice alleging that another State party is responsible for genocide.
The term is included in the statutes of all the international courts and tribunals (but not the UN- backed Special Court for Sierra Leone), taking the definition from the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” In addition to individual criminal responsibility for genocide, the Genocide Convention also establishes State responsibility—that is, international legal responsibility of the State itself for breaching its obligations under the convention. Parties to the convention can bring a case before the UN’s International Court of Justice alleging that another State party is responsible for genocide.
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