Invitation to the seminar: The World in the Age of Genocide at United Nations Secretariat Building in New York

The discussion will be moderated by Andrew Nagorski, writer and Vice-President of The EastWest Institute and the panelists will be:

Fatou B. Bensouda, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court,

Irwin Cotler, Professor of international law, former Minister of Justice of Canada,

David Harris, Executive Director of American Jewish Committee. 

Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent. He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he coined in 1944. He first used the word in print in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress, and defined it as "the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group."

Raphael Lemkin was born in Bezwodne, Poland, on June 24, in 1900. He mastered nine languages by the age of 14, including French, Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian. After graduating from a local trade school in Bialystok he began to study linguistics at the John Casimir University in Lvov. It was there that Lemkin became interested in the concept of the crime, which later was involved into the idea of genocide. Lemkin then moved on to the University of Heidelberg in Germany to study philosophy, and returned to Lvov to study law in 1926, becoming a prosecutor in Warsaw at graduation.

After the outbreak of World War II Lemkin witnessed the atrocities and violence of occupants and managed to reach Sweden in 1940, before being allowed entry to the United States in 1941. After World War II, Lemkin remained in exile in the United States. From 1948 onward he gave lectures on criminal law at Yale University. Lemkin also continued his campaign for international laws defining and forbidding genocide, which he had championed ever since the Madrid conference of 1933. He proposed a similar ban on crimes against humanity during the Paris Peace Conference of 1945, but his proposal was turned down. Lemkin presented a draft resolution for a Genocide Convention treaty to a number of countries in an effort to persuade them to sponsor the resolution. The Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally presented and adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 9, 1948.

In 1951, Lemkin finally achieved his goal when this Convention came into force, after the 20th nation ratified the treaty. For all his efforts he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, 1951, 1952, 1958 and 1959. He died in New York in 1959, at the age of 59.

MODERATOR

Andrew Nagorski, who was born in Scotland to Polish parents, moved to the United States as an infant and has rarely stopped moving since. An award-winning journalist who spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek, Nagorski is currently Vice President and Director of Public Policy at the EastWest Institute, a New York-based international affairs think tank. He earned a B.A. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College in 1969 and studied at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Nagorski’s most recent book, Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power,  has received rave reviews in numerous publications, including The Economist, The New York Review of Books and The Columbia Journalism Review. His other non-fiction books are Reluctant Farewell: An American Reporter’s Candid Look Inside the Soviet Union; The Birth of Freedom: Shaping Lives and Societies in the New Eastern Europe; and The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II. His first novel, Last Stop Vienna, about a young German who joins the early Nazi movement and then is propelled into a confrontation with Hitler, was on the Washington Post’s bestseller list.  In November 2009, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski presented Nagorski with the newly created Bene Merito award for his reporting from Poland about the Solidarity movement in the 1980s. In 2011, Poland’s President Bronislaw Komorowski awarded him the Cavalry Cross for the same reason.

PANELISTS

Fatou B. Bensouda is a Gambian lawyer, former government civil servant and International Criminal Court\'s Prosecutor since June 2012. Her international career as a non-government civil servant formally began at the International Criminal Tribunal  for Rwanda, where she worked as a Legal Adviser and Trial Attorney before rising to the position of Senior Legal Advisor and Head of the Legal Advisory Unit in the years of 2002  to 2004. After acquiring a Master of Laws from the International Maritime Law Institute in Malta, she became the Gambia’s first expert in international maritime law and the law of the sea. Mrs. Bensouda has served as delegate to United Nations conferences on crime prevention, the Organization of African Unity’s Ministerial Meetings on Human Rights, and as delegate of The Gambia to the meetings of the Preparatory Commission for the International Criminal Court. Mrs. Bensouda has been the recipient of various awards, most notably, the distinguished ICJ International Jurists Award (2009), which was presented by President of India P. D. Patil. Mrs. Bensouda was given this award for her contributions to criminal law both at the national and International level. She has also been awarded the 2011 World Peace Through Law Award presented by the Whitney Harris World Law Institute, Washington University, which recognized her work in considerably advancing the rule of law and thereby contributing to world peace.

Irwin Cotler is presently a Canadian Member of Parliament and Emeritus Professor of Law at McGill University. Mr. Cotler has served as Chair or Vice-Chair of both the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and its sub-Committee on Human Rights and International Development, and the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. In 2000, he was appointed special advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the International Criminal Court, and served as the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada from 2003 to 2006.  He is considered an expert on international law and human rights law, and served as counsel to former prisoners of conscience Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Jacobo Timmerman in Latin America, and Saad Eddin Ibrahim in Egypt, as well as other well known political prisoners and dissidents. As Minister of Justice, Mr. Cotler tabled Canada\'s first-ever National Justice Initiative against Racism, while making the struggle against genocide and impunity an international justice priority. Mr. Cotler led the Canadian delegation to the Stockholm Conference on the prevention of genocide, and his attempts to bring war criminals to justice have won praise, as has his founding of all-party Parliamentary groups to bring attention and action to end the genocide in Darfur, as well as the lessons of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide, as in the case of Rwanda. Mr. Cotler is an officer of the Order of Canada, and the recipient of ten honourary doctorates for his work in the advancement of peace and human rights.

David Harris is the Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee, one of the oldest Jewish advocacy organizations in the United States, which The New York Times has branded as the dean of American Jewish organizations. Prior to joining AJC, Mr. Harris graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania. He pursued his graduate studies in international relations at the London School of Economics and then spent a year as a Junior Associate at Oxford University. He is a leading Jewish advocate who meets with world leaders to advance Israel\'s diplomatic standing and promote international human rights and inter-religious and inter-ethnic understanding. As one of his many achievements at AJC, he was a key figure in the successful sixteen-year struggle to repeal the infamous Zionism is racism resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1975, only the second time in UN history a resolution was actually repealed. And he spearheaded AJC’s successful campaign to correct Israel’s anomalous status at the UN, where it had been the only nation ineligible to sit on the Security Council. In 2008, Harris was the first American Jewish leader to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos at a plenary session entitled, Faith and Modernization. He is an author of article Defining Genocide: Defining History? which examines the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to understanding genocide. Mr. Harris has been honored more than ten times by the governments of Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Spain, and Ukraine for his many international activities on behalf of the defense of human rights, advancement of the transatlantic partnership, and dedication to the Jewish people.