Cultural Heritage and the Denial of Genocide Law

Abstract

In 1933, over a decade before inscribing the term ‘genocide’ in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) and ‘following a special invitation’ to a law conference in Madrid, Polish-Jewish attorney, Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) proposed a set of offences he considered instrumental to defining ‘acts of extermination directed against [the] ethnic, religious or social collectivities whatever the motive (political, religious, etc.)’.² The proposal attempted to revise an initiative presented a few years earlier at the Conference of Warsaw (1927) to criminalize what was then described as the ‘intentional use of any instrument capable of producing a public danger’.³ He suggested that ‘[p]ublic danger’ — which, he claimed, referred to ‘personally indeterminate individuals or an indeterminate quantity of the goods on a given territory’ — failed to capture the initiative’s intentions. Lemkin recommended, instead, the alternative wording, ‘interstate danger’⁴ [danger interétat] to emphasize the threat posed to ‘the interests of several States and their inhabitants’.⁵