Raphael Lemkin

Raphael Lemkin (Polish: Rafał Lemkin) is a Polish-born Jewish jurist. He coined the word genocide, which is the equivalent of the concept of "genocide", and played a leading role in the preparation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

He was born on June 24, 1900, in the village of Bezwodne, which at that time was within the borders of the Russian Empire, today in Belarus. He studied law at the University of Lwów in the 1920s and completed his doctorate; He then worked as a prosecutor in Warsaw. In his youth, his reflection on the massacres of Ottoman Armenians and the impunity for these events marked the beginning of his interest in the mass crimes committed by states against their own people.

In his text for an international law conference in Madrid in 1933, he proposed making the destruction of communities an international crime.

War years and genocide concept

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he left Warsaw, went to Sweden via Lithuania, and reached the USA in 1941. The same year, he began teaching at Duke University's law school. In his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944, he proposed the term genocide by combining the Greek suffixes genos, meaning "race, race", and the Latin suffixes -cide, meaning "killing". He lost dozens of members of his family during the war and the Holocaust.

After the war, he made intense efforts to introduce the concept into international law. The convention, the preparation of which he pioneered, was accepted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and came into force in 1951. Lemkin, who also taught at Yale and Rutgers, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize many times.

He died in New York on August 28, 1959. Its name has become synonymous with the recognition of genocide as an independent international crime.