Genocide is a naturally controversial and often politicized term. Even among well-intentioned genocide scholars and preventionists, there is ongoing controversy over how the word should be defined. In general, though, genocide can be thought of as the intentional extermination of a group of people defined by their race, religion, nationality, or ethnicity. The most definitive source for the meaning of genocide is the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This law was created mostly through the tireless efforts of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who lost most of his family in the Holocaust. Lemkin’s vision to ban such exterminations of innocent people was passed into international law by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948 (though it did not come into force until 1951). Although the Genocide Convention remains subject to debate and has been diluted and weakened by political interference from many states, it still gives us the most widely-recognized and only legal definition of genocide in the world. It is to this definition, from Articles 2 and 3 of the Convention, to which the Sentinel Project adheres:

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article 3

The following acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

(d ) Attempt to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide.