On the 9th of December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 260 (III) A as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This seeks to prevent and to punish persons from committing genocide. There are currently 143 contracting parties to the Convention which includes the United States, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, France, among others. In Article 2 of the Convention, genocide is defined as any act that is committed with the intention of destroying a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in part or as a whole. These acts include: (1) killing members of the group, (2) inflicting serious physical or mental harm, (3) deliberately manipulating the life conditions of the group in order to destroy it physically, (4) exacting methods of preventing within the group, and (5) forcibly removing children within the group to transfer them to another group. Article 3 states that any person who is found to (1) commit, (2) conspire to commit, (3) directly and publicly provoking to commit, (4) attempt to commit, and (5) aid in committing genocide shall be punished.
