As a Christian minority seeking autonomy in the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the Armenians were considered to be enemies from within of the ethnic unification project to create a Turkish empire. The Young Turks government planned and carried out the genocide: 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians were assassinated through deportations and sweeping massacres.

Deportation of Armenians
Photo: Armin T. Wegner © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen

Leaders of the Young Turk movement were prosecuted for organizing the Armenian genocide. A number of the accused were then sent to Malta to be tried by an international court. These trials, however, never occurred; this was also the case for Mustafa Abdülhalik Renda.

Mustafa Abdülhalik Renda, 1935.

Six million Jews living in Europe and North Africa were systematically killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, who believed in a racist ideology by which the Jews constituted a threat to the survival of the Aryan “race”. Ghettos, mobile killing units, imprisonment, and murder in concentration and death camps were employed.

Deportation of Jews to death camps.
Photo: MHMC

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was established by the Allies after World War II. Some twenty Nazi officers were tried for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Twelve were condemned to death, two to life imprisonment, four incurred sentences ranging from ten to twenty years, and three were acquitted.
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1945 or 1946.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations (UN) in response to the atrocities committed during the Second World War. All member States were required to prevent and punish genocide, as well as any incitement to commit genocide.

Raphael Lemkin, originator of the Convention and Ricardo Alfaro, chairman of the UN General Assembly’s Legal Committee.
Source: UN Photo

Under the communist dictatorship of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge pitted the “ancient people” against the “new people”, who had ties to the previous regime and were to be destroyed, along with the ethnic and religious minorities. Between 1.7 and 2.2 million Cambodians were executed or worked to death or died of hunger or illness.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh.
Photo: Christian Haugen, Flickr

Some 800 000 Rwandans of the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus were killed—mainly by machete—by the Hutu majority, which perceived them as a threat to its authority. The genocide was orchestrated by Hutu Power extremists and carried out by local officials and the Hutu population.

Three waves of violence against Tutsis: 1959, 1973 and 1994.
Source: PAGE-RWANDA

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established by the UN in 1994 in Arusha, Tanzania to prosecute the main perpetrators of the genocide and other crimes. The tribunal will have completed its work by 2014 or 2015.
ICTR’s logo.
Source: Adam Jones

During the Bosnian War, some 7000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men were killed in Srebrenica by the Serb Republic of Bosnia’s army. Both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice declared this massacre a genocide. The ICTY continues to prosecute individuals suspected of involvement in the massacre.
The ICTY in The Hague, Netherlands.
Source: Photograph provided courtesy of the ICTY.

The Rome Statute was adopted on July 17, 1998, and was ratified by more than 120 countries. It defined the operating rules of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC has permanent standing and is charged with the task of prosecuting people responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.
Source: Vincent van Zeijst

Agreement between the government of Cambodia and the UN to establish the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. The tribunal consists of local and international magistrates and prosecutes the senior Khmer rouge officers for crimes committed between 1975 and 1979.
In 2011, a number of Buddhist Monks from Preah Sihanouk Raja Buddhist University attended hearings on Nuon Chea’s and Ieng Thirith’s fitness to stand trial.
Source: ECCC.

On April 23, 2014, Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey offered his condolences to the grand-children of the Armenian victims of 1915-1916. Ninety-nine years after the event, however, Turkey still refuses to acknowledge that these massacres constitute genocide. The prime minister proceeded to deny the genocide five days after offering his condolences.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey.
Source: Government of Chile_