“We must shorten the distance between the heart and the deed.
To live an idea and not only talk about it or feel it.”
Names are important. We cannot fight what we do not name. It is impossible to triage, diagnose, and treat illness without accurately naming the underlying issue. Clarity—reducing ambiguity—informs action. The clarifying moment in international human rights law came with the 1951 Genocide Convention. The United Nations (UN) now sets aside December 9th as its annual International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and Prevention of this Crime. But genocide itself was not new in 1951. Occurrences of mass atrocities span millennia, from the enslavement of Hebrews in Egypt to the oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. However, until the mid-20th century, no framework existed to prevent and confront atrocity crimes or to require states to prevent and punish genocide because the crime of genocide was nameless.
Raphael Lemkin changed the landscape of justice by forming the word “genocide” in November 1944.1 Not only did he coin the word—he pressed on to advocate for a UN Resolution to establish the concept, and for continued ratification and implementation by participant nations. The story of this journey from the origin of the word to the Convention’s creation as international law embodies deep commitment to human dignity, perpetrator accountability, and justice. It also illustrates the impact of clarifying systemic gaps, building precise solutions, and creating capacity to right wrongs despite tremendous resistance in the slow work of justice. To begin, nomenclature is critical.
State sovereignty and lessons of history
The origin story of “genocide” begins in 1648 with the Peace Treaties of Westphalia, where recognition of the sovereignty of states came into being. The Westphalian Sovereignty Principle requires that states either punish themselves for crimes they commit against their own people, or they not be punished at all. This foundational principle of sovereign equality (later enshrined in the UN Charter, Chapter 1, Article 2) would have a profound impact on international law, and the creation and implementation of the Genocide Convention exactly 300 years later.
Raphael Lemkin was born into a world where genocide occurred, but legal mechanisms for holding states accountable for atrocity crimes did not yet exist. In his book, An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians, international human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson writes: “There was, until the Nuremberg Charter in 1945, no international criminal law to punish the political and military leaders of sovereign states for the mass murder of their own citizens.” Three years later, on December 9, 1948, the 55 delegates of the UN General Assembly voted unanimously for the first UN human rights treaty: the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would follow closely the very next day. Raphael Lemkin provided the key conceptual piece that made this victory possible by coining that infamous name.
Born in 1900 to a Polish Jewish family in what is now Belarus, Lemkin was a natural polyglot. By the age of 20, he was fluent in seven languages, picking up several more over the years. At age 12 in 1913, he read Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, a book that would prove pivotal in shaping the trajectory of his life and the creation of the word “genocide” decades later. Reading Sienkiewicz’s descriptions of Nero’s persecution of Christians led to Lemkin’s lifelong fascination with how societies reach the point where they approve brutal exterminations on account of religion, ethnicity, or race. Rather than discourage her young son’s newfound curiosity, Lemkin’s mother encouraged him to develop his thinking further by reading about the siege of Carthage, the Mongol invasions of Europe and Asia, and the persecution of the French Huguenots. She encouraged her son to consider what happens in the absence of accountability for acts of dehumanization and annihilation—acts that would later be defined as “crimes against humanity.”
Lemkin did not have to look at the distant past alone. Two years later, the world watched as the Armenian Genocide unfolded in 1915. The architects of that genocide masked their intentional acts of extermination with the convenient phrase, “crimes of war” as they rounded up and killed intellectuals, destroyed graveyards, churches, and sites of historical significance, and deported Armenians to die in the desert. Because there was no system for holding a government accountable for crimes committed against its own citizens, the world observed from the sidelines while the Ottoman government operated with impunity. In 1921, survivors of the Armenian genocide, exasperated by the reality that there was no system of accountability, took justice into their own hands and murdered government officials who had instigated the violence against them, their families, and their neighbors. Lemkin, then studying philology at the University of Lvov, remembered the lessons from his history books. He recognized the need for both a criminal definition and an accountability mechanism to prevent not only mass extermination by governments of their own citizens, but also the pendulum swing of retributive vigilante justice. He transferred to law school.
Dr. Raphael Lemkin (U.S. Library of Congress)
“We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”
Precise language matters for shaping and reflecting how societies think, speak, and act. Language and law would become the tools Lemkin would wield to pursue human dignity and perpetrator accountability. In 1917, the phrase, “crimes against humanity” entered print for the first time (it would not gain legal definition or recognition due to the Westphalian Sovereignty Principle until the London Agreement in 1945 preceding the Nuremberg Trials). While working as a prosecutor in 1929, Lemkin, in his free time, began drafting language that could enable governments to hold other governments accountable for their acts of violence against their own citizens. Because the word “genocide” did not yet exist, nor were there any other recognized crimes with equivalent legal weight, Lemkin linked the crimes of “barbarism” and “vandalism” to form his initial draft law on government accountability for acts of premeditated destruction of citizens and cultures. In 1933, a draft of Lemkin’s proposed law was presented at a conference of lawyers in Madrid. While the events in the Ottoman Empire served as the backdrop for Lemkin’s thinking, he was also watching the rising tide of Naziism in Germany with vigilant concern. He warned that without a named crime and an accountability mechanism in place, the atrocities would soon repeat. Lemkin’s words proved prophetic. He would lose 49 members of his family as victims of the Holocaust, including his own parents. But at the 1933 Madrid Conference when the horrors of the Holocaust could not yet be imagined, Lemkin’s ideas were booed off stage.
The lack of accountability and obligation on states to prevent atrocity crimes gave free reign to Adolf Hitler. On August 22, 1939, Hitler gathered his military chiefs and gave his now famously chilling statement as license to invade Poland: “I have issued the command—and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad—that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space [Lebensraum] which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler, like Lemkin, recognized that without laws in place, perpetrators could annihilate with impunity. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and unleashed the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Emily Milnes, July 2025)
Lemkin did not give up on his crusade. In the years leading up to World War II, he continued to present his ideas at conferences throughout Europe. In 1940, he requested refuge, and in 1941, sailed to the United States. In 1942, Lemkin began working as chief consultant for the United States’ Board of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Economic Administration and continued lobbying for action. In 1944, he became an international law expert for the U.S. War Department. Despite his tireless crusade, his proximity to Washington, and the deadly havoc World War II was inflicting upon Europe, his lobbying for a new atrocity law failed to gain an audience. That is, until another man voiced his recognition of theabsence of a name for what was happening around them. That man was Winston Churchill, who, in a 1941 BBC broadcast, said, “we are in the presence of a crime without a name.”
The birth of a word
In November 1944, that atrocity crime finally got its name. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin’s book: Axis Rule in occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress. Lemkin titled chapter nine, “Genocide,” marking the first time the word appeared to the world in print. Drawing on his broad knowledge of languages, Lemkin combined the Greek morpheme “geno” (meaning “race” or “tribe”) with the Latin morpheme “cide” (meaning “killing”). Gradually, the name gained recognition.
Coining the word and defining indicators of genocide was only half the battle. Gaining international recognition of the word and validation as an international crime would be the focus of the remainder of Lemkin’s life. Only then would prevention mechanisms gain traction. In a post-war international law conference in Cambridge, Lemkin argued that if piracy is recognized as an international crime, then why not genocide? “Certainly, human beings and their cultures are more important than a ship and its cargo…Surely Shakespeare is more precious than cotton.”
“Field of Cotton Trees” (Unsplash)
The word recognized by international law
In the early aftermath of World War II, Lemkin became a familiar figure in the halls of the newly formed United Nations temporarily located on Long Island. He subjected anyone who would listen (willingly or unwillingly) to his impassioned arguments for the concept of genocide to become agreed upon, recognized, and enacted as international law. His determination began to pay off. In October 1945, the Nuremberg Indictment provided the first official mention of “genocide” in an international setting, stating that all 24 defendants had “conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories.” One year later, the verdicts of the Nuremberg Trial (the focus of a recent popular film) held that 19 of the Nazi defendants were convicted for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. There was no mention of genocide because it was not yet recognized as an international crime—that would come later with the creation and ratification of the Convention.
Lemkin’s tenacity led to a 1946 UN Resolution recognizing genocide as an international crime. The Resolution then tasked a committee to draft a treaty. Because no one was more committed to the cause than Lemkin, UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie asked Lemkin to again pick up his pen to prepare the first draft of the UN Genocide Convention. In 1947, recognizing that the humanity of genocide victims’ names, faces, and stories is important for the development of human rights, Lemkin began a history of genocide, as well. The UN adopted the Convention in 1948 and ratified it as international law by two-thirds majority in 1951. Recalling the millions of victims of genocide, Lemkin called this an “epitaph on his mother’s grave.”
Lemkin’s work was far from over. As more countries joined the UN after World War II, Lemkin advocated tirelessly for continued ratification. Eventually, the work killed him. He was hospitalized more than once for what he called “Genociditis” and exhaustion. In 1959, he suffered a heart attack and died in a reporter’s office while advocating for the victims of genocide and the importance of country ratification. Only seven people would attend the funeral of this giant for human rights, perpetrator accountability, and human dignity. After he died, others picked up the baton advocating for the implementation of the Genocide Convention so that the parchment promise would come alive. Today, 153 nations are parties to the Convention.
The story of the etymology of “genocide”—like the story of justice today—is long. The definition of “genocide” took shape against the backdrop of the Armenian Genocide in the early 20th century. The Genocide Convention passed in the decade following the Holocaust. The Convention’s first conviction would not come until the 1997 trial following the Rwandan Genocide. Today, in the 21st century, genocide is occurring again in places like Xinjiang, Sudan, and arguably Nigeria. Lemkin was right in his warnings: history repeats itself and demands our vigilant attention to injustice and evil. It demands implementation of the law. It demands that we name names.
“Shorten the distance”
During his life, Lemkin said, “We must shorten the distance between the heart and the deed. To live an idea and not only talk about it or feel it.” That presents an inspiring question for all of us today—what does it mean to move from agreement to action in the work of justice, perpetrator accountability, and human dignity? This applies to fighting human trafficking, resisting genocide, removing forced labor from global supply chains, and providing trauma-informed services to survivors. In her book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power describes an anecdotal exchange that shows the importance of Lemkin’s vision of policy and enforcement for building solutions to injustice today:
“Rosenthal often challenged Lemkin with the realist approach: ‘Lemkin, what good will it do to write mass murder down as a crime; will a piece of paper stop a new Hitler or Stalin?’ Lemkin, the believer, would stiffen and snap: ‘Only man has law. Law must be built, do you understand me? You must build the law!’ As Rosenthal notes, ‘He was not naive. He didn’t expect criminals to lay down [sic] and stop committing crimes. He simply believed that if the law was in place it would have an effect—sooner or later.’”
We would do well to remember the words of Lemkin—to “shorten the distance” by not just talking about or feeling the ideals of justice, but doingthe hard, slow, tenacious work of living them.
- To learn more about Lemkin’s story, read “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power and An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians byGeoffrey Robertson. ↩︎
