Kat Bowman

Genocide and Human Rights

30 August 2020

Influencing the UDHR

A common saying in the history community is "Those who cannot remember the past

are condemned to repeat it." So I will briefly trace the history of the Genocide Convention. All of

the documents mentioned below are predecessors of the Genocide Convention. The Magna

Carta was the beginning of defining human rights in the West. It limited the King’s power and

declared that in theory no man is above the law and the Law should work for the people. The

English Bill of Rights further outlines the boundaries that the King must follow. The Declaration

of Independence was the people of the (at the time) colonies of Britain deciding enough was

enough we want the basic human rights because the government should protect the people

not persecute them. The UN Charter is the beginning of the agency that the Genocide

Convention was created by.

The Genocide Convention defined genocide as committing certain acts with “the intent

to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” (Ishay 492). These

acts include killing people part of that group, harming them physically or mentally,

discrimination with the intent to physically harm, creating regulations to prevent birth in that

group, or robbing the group of their children. This is a huge step forward because it protected

the rights of groups as well as the individual. This led to the creation of the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights, which is a blanket document protecting and defining the rights of

all humans. Both of these documents came about partially due to humanity’s need to have their
rights and the boundaries of what is right and wrong written out. Now, the rights of the people

being written does not mean that people’s rights will not be violated. Any documents that

define human rights would not exist unless certain rights were violated. The Genocide

Convention was directly caused by the mass slaughter that the Nazi regime committed. The

Universal Declaration of Human Rights would not exist without the United Nations, which was

formed after WW2 and above-mentioned Nazi regime.

The Genocide Convention laid the final groundwork for equal rights for all. It criminalized

the stamping out of groups of people because the people in power believe that their race,

sexuality, country, etc. is superior or that the other group deserves to be wiped out.

I feel compelled to mention one key fact: with all of the UN documents or any document

that deals with the rights of people that is not law of the land, although sometimes this applies

to law of the land documents (see the English Bill of Rights), there will be people who cherry-

pick what they want to adhere to. Everyone’s idea of universal human rights are different. A

person’s cultural background and the events they experience shape what they believe are fair

rights as well as the information they hear and the education they receive. In closing, the

Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the French

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the UN Charter, and the Genocide Convention

built on top of each other and were the corner stones for the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights.
 Works Cited

Ishay, M. (2012). The human rights reader: Major political essays, speeches, and documents

from ancient times to the present. New York ; London, NY: Routledge.