Meeting in Paris, the UN General Assembly unanimously approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Drafted largely by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term 'genocide' in 1944, the treaty defined the crime and obligated signatory nations to prevent and punish it, marking the first human rights treaty adopted by the UN.
Raphael Lemkin had spent years lobbying delegates in hotel lobbies and corridors, buttonholing diplomats with a persistence that colleagues found exhausting and, ultimately, indispensable. He had lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust and treated the convention's passage as a personal, almost religious mission.
The word 'genocide' itself was barely four years old, coined by Lemkin in his 1944 book 'Axis Rule in Occupied Europe' by fusing the Greek 'genos' (race, tribe) with the Latin 'cide' (killing). The convention defined the crime as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.
Despite its landmark status, the convention had no enforcement mechanism, and decades would pass — through Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Balkans — before any perpetrator faced prosecution under its terms. Lemkin, exhausted and largely uncelebrated, died in 1959 having devoted his life's savings and health to a treaty whose promise remained, for most of the twentieth century, unfulfilled.