Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, commonly the Genocide Convention, is a United Nations treaty that defines genocide as an international crime and obliges its parties to prevent and punish it. The General Assembly adopted it unanimously on 9 December 1948, and it entered into force on 12 January 1951; it counted 153 state parties as of February 2025. The treaty was a direct response to the atrocities of the Second World War, above all the Holocaust, which along with the earlier Armenian genocide had exposed the absence of any legal definition or prohibition of mass group destruction; the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word genocide in 1944, led the campaign for the convention. It defines genocide as any of five acts, including killing members of a group and forcibly transferring its children elsewhere, committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part, and it also criminalizes conspiracy, incitement, attempts and complicity, applying to perpetrators regardless of their official position.