On 9 December 1948 the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly; on 10 December 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was likewise adopted. (The General Assembly was busy that week, hey?) Despite continued breaches of both of these documents – which if we’re brutally honest, was fairly predictable – they have shaped global political discourse ever since – not just in the field of human rights, but much more widely.
I want to write more about human rights, but I fear that anything I write will be reduced in the writing of it. These two documents – but especially the Genocide Convention – are cornerstones of the reason I do the work that I do, building blocks of the person that I am. I fear pressing against them too hard – not because they might collapse, but because I might collapse. So instead I will post this story about Raphael Lemkin, architect of the Genocide Convention and one of my heroes, who, by the time the Convention was adopted, had lost his entire family except his brother.
He walked the halls every day from the spring of 1946 until Dec. 9, 1948, when the General Assembly, in Paris, adopted a resolution approving his convention. That day reporters went looking for him to rejoice in his triumph. But we could not find him until, hours later, we thought to look into the darkened Assembly hall. He sat there weeping as if his heart would break. He asked please to be left in solitude. Then this Lemkin came back to the corridors for years, pleading with delegation after delegation to follow through on the U.N. resolution by getting their countries to sign the treaty… But he died alone on Aug. 28, 1959, without medals or prizes, in a hotel in New York. There were seven people at the graveside when Raphael Lemkin was buried.
Lemkin’s fate – persecuted, ridiculed and ignored – tragically mirrors the experience of many, many human rights activists over these years. Progress is not guaranteed, and never secure, and so we keep working in the hope that one day human rights are distributed more evenly, from America to Zimbabwe.
Tags: genocide, human rights, Raphael Lemkin