Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (review)

John Cooper's meticulous account of the life and work of Raphael Lemkin (1900– 1959), the Polish Jewish lawyer known for coining the term "genocide," is the first comprehensive biography of the tireless campaigner for the UN Genocide Convention. Although Cooper focuses on Lemkin's postwar attempts to secure the protection of national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups within the framework of international law, he also offers riveting descriptions of Lemkin's childhood in the contested multi-ethnic borderland of Eastern Poland and his formative years as a student in Lwów (Lvov) in the 1920s. The author also provides valuable information on Lemkin's thriving career as an attorney in private practice and as an international legal scholar (despite the severe discrimination against Jewish professionals in Polish society in the 1930s). He then traces the steps of his escape first to Lithuania and then to Sweden prior to his arrival in the United States in April 1941. Cautiously drawing upon Lemkin's unpublished—and at times unreliable— autobiography, Cooper emphasizes key aspects of his subject's prewar life: Lemkin had a traditional Jewish upbringing but was immersed in secular knowledge; from an early age, he was sensitive to the plight of threatened groups—a sensitivity influenced by Simon Dubnow's advocacy of "cultural autonomy"—and was presciently aware of the shortcomings of interwar "minority protections." Finally, Cooper details the profound impact of the Nazis' destruction of Poland on Lemkin's later writings and lobbying efforts.

Yet, Cooper argues, Lemkin's intellectual trajectory is less linear than it seems. When the Warsaw jurist proposed in 1933 to make the "the crime of barbarity" and the "crime of vandalism" against ethnic or social groups infractions under international law, he had in mind only the protection of Polish Jewry under the deficient minority protection system; he did not yet envision broader legal guarantees to save whole groups from extermination. Lemkin's conceptualization of genocide, Cooper contends, was primarily a response to the "Final Solution" and, more generally, to the subject of his well-known 1944 monograph, Axis Rule in Occupied Countries. In this thorough investigation of Nazi occupation policies in Europe, Lemkin introduced the concept of genocide into international law and proposed specific measures for redress. At various stages, the deliberations of the Nuremberg Tribunal referred to the crime of "genocide" as defined by Lemkin. Yet to the Polish jurist's dismay (he was present in the capacity of U.S. War Department advisor at the reading of the verdicts), the court ignored the specificity of genocide when it convicted the Nazi leadership under the broader charge of "crimes against humanity." Cooper shows that the concept of genocide, even if masked under the label "crimes against humanity," won gradual acceptance in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials (1946–1949)—an indication of Lemkin's influence on the conduct of postwar international retributive justice.

Lemkin's first tangible achievement was single-handedly to persuade the United Nations to pass a resolution identifying genocide as a crime (December 11, 1946), an important milestone in the "struggle for the Genocide Convention" he carried out in the corridors of the new international organization. With great and perhaps excessive attention to detail, Cooper reconstructs the three-year process culminating in the twenty member states' ratification of the Genocide Convention in January 1951. Despite the book's density, students of postwar human rights surely will benefit from the wealth of information Cooper has made available through his archival research. To be sure, this type of forensic analysis, based on a wide array of UN and diplomatic records, does not make for a comfortable read. But the genesis of the Genocide Convention involved legal intricacies, numerous proposals and counter-proposals, and a great deal of backdoor maneuvering; the book provides the first factual account of the gradual emergence of genocide as a concept in international law. The "crime without a name" Winston Churchill alluded to in 1941 now possessed...