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Reading John Quigley’s book is truly fascinating if you have some time to spare on such a difficult topic.
Despite a somehow slow beginning, ‘The Genocide Convention’ takes the reader deep inside the maze of the 1948 Convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. Nearly 60 years after it was adopted, this relatively short convention (barely nine substantial articles) keeps raising issues over its interpretation and its implementation, issues that the practice of national and international tribunals is slowly trying to solve.
Who has never read or heard that the 20th century had witnessed 3, maybe 4 genocides? Those we mainly hear about are the Armenian’s, the Jew’s or the Tutsi’s genocide, or maybe the Bosnian genocide in Srebrenica, or the Cambodian one under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, or even the Palestinian genocide in Sabra and Chattila. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg and the notion of genocide must be understood in a much wider way, so John Quigley. It is not doing justice to the notion of genocide to reduce it to those few examples.
Through different assumptions, the author subtly demonstrates that genocide, the ‘crime of all crimes’, is most likely to be committed more frequently than one could imagine. When we think of genocide, we tend to think first of the ones that are committed on a large scale, but Quigley also raises the possibility of a genocide committed by an individual - and with only a few victims - whose intent was to eliminate a particular group of person as a whole. The book also takes on the example of genocide committed through a nuclear attack, or through regular air attack, or by destroying a protected group’s habitat, or by way of ethnic cleansing.
Genocide implies the destruction of a group, but what does the term ‘destruction’ imply? It does not necessarily mean the death of the whole group or of most of its individuals. Is eliminating political opponents constitutive of genocide? Is the eradication of a group leaders’ enough? And by the way, who are those ‘protected groups’ mentioned in the convention, and how should they be defined?
‘The Genocide Convention’ also analyzes other specificities of the crime of genocide: the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group, by committing a certain number of actions constitutive of genocide (willful killing, serious bodily harm, inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, … ).
With 45 short chapters, John Quigley’s book is a valuable one. It is pleasant to read and it is not too technical for a legal work. The only regret is that the author leaves open many of the very good questions he poses throughout the book. But this is certainly due to the very nature of the crime of genocide and to the definition given to it by the 1948 convention.
One complaint however: a price that not everyone can afford.
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