They look like a drawer. That it is almost two natural laws, like the persecution of murder since Cain and Abel. But no. The crimes of genocide and of crimes against humanity they are a recent ‘construct’, from World War II. Until the nuremberg trials its typification did not exist. No one linked the genocide of the armenian people at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, in 1915, nor the bombing of the civilian population (Guernica) as crimes.
International justice never raised its voice, in the 1930s, against every step the Nazis took to persecute, corner, deport and finally execute to millions of european citizens from Jewish faith.
the jurists that they created, baptized and developed both crimes and convinced the judicial instances of the allied nations (United States, Great Britain and also France) of the need to employ them at Nuremberg were Jews. Something even logical. But also, both jurists, Hersch Lauterpacht Y Raphael Lemkin, they grew up and studied law in the now Ukrainian, and then Austro-Hungarian, city of, today, Lviv and so lemberg, Lviv, in Spanish.
The crimes that devastated their families in Lviv return, at the hands of the Russian Army, 80 years later, sadly home.
armenian background
“Who remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?” he cried. Adolf Hitler when he ordered his military to devastate Poland. And that phrase spurred Lemkin’s investigations that he collected in his book ‘The Power of the Axis in Occupied Europe’, published in 1944. There he defined the crime and the lexical term.
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If he genocide stood as group Protection, or of an individual for belonging to a group, the Crimes against humanity protect the individual against the violence of states at war. All genocide is a crime against humanity, but not the other way around.
Lauterpacht was the one who developed the concept of crimes against humanity, also, as a result of the Armenian case. He was one of those who wrote the final speech of the British prosecutor in Nuremberg. Lemkin, that of English. One sat chair in the Columbia University, In U.S.A. The other, in the cambridge (United Kingdom). They both narrowly escaped horror. Although at that time it was not yet typified.