Definition of Genocide: Genocide is the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group. It’s a grave crime against humanity, characterized by actions intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a group of people based on their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. This includes killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions to bring about its physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, or forcibly transferring children out of the group.
Etymology and Origin: The term ‘genocide’ was coined in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, as a combination of ‘geno-‘, from the Greek ‘genos‘ meaning ‘race’ or ‘tribe’, and ‘-cide’, from the Latin ‘caedere’ meaning ‘to kill’. Lemkin developed the concept in response to the mass atrocities of the Holocaust and sought to create a legal framework for prosecuting and preventing such crimes. The term and its legal definition were later adopted by the United Nations in the Genocide Convention of 1948.
