Responding to Genocide: Jewish Perspectives on the Responsibiliy
to Protect Responding to Genocide: Jewish Perspectives on the
Responsibiliy to Protect By Aaron Dorfman Reprinted with
permission from MyJewishLearning.com, April 25, 2006. In
December 1946, the first session of the United Nations General
Assembly adopted a resolution that made genocide a prosecutable
crime under international law. Two years later they adopted the
Genocide Convention, which offered a precise legal definition of
genocide and outlined the mechanisms for punishing its
perpetrators. International Responses to Genocide These
developments grew out of the international community's
collective guilt about the Holocaust and were inspired,
particularly, by the efforts of a Polish Jew named Raphael
Lemkin. Lemkin was interested in establishing genocide codes
even before World War II. He had been outraged by the absence of
a legal framework under which to prosecute the Turkish
perpetrators of the Armenian genocide (1915-1918). After
escaping