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WHAT HE SAID AND WHAT HE WROTE
replaced by another international agreement, the Lausanne
Treaty that was signed on 24 July 1923. The latter included a
declaration of amnesty for all crimes committed between 1
August 1914 and 20 November 1922.
It is common knowledge that genocide reached its full
dimensions during World War II when Nazi Germany exterminated
the Jews, describing it as the “Final Solution”. The word ‘genocide’
was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish scholar. When
Lemkin was a student, he followed closely the trial of the
defendants implicated in the Armenian incidents, which he
considered genocide. Lemkin’s concept of that crime was a very
comprehensive one. His definition embraced the political,
economic, social, cultural, moral, physical or biological destruction
of the minorities. The law, which evolved in more recent times,
came to consider ‘genocide’ not any act committed with the aim of
destroying just any group but only certain groups; and only if those
groups were destroyed physically or biologically. In other words,
the latter greatly narrowed down the scope of the description
originally made by Lemkin, simply by excluding from the
interpretation of genocide political, economic, social, cultural and
moral destruction of groups.
Since, at the time, what the Nazis did to the Jews in the early
1940s had not been fully known, Britain and the United States
especially did not favor of having an international tribunal deal
with the crimes committed within the borders of Germany. They
were, on the other hand, maintaining that for the crimes
committed by that state outside its national borders, that is, in the
countries it occupied, the persons responsible should be put on
trial. Thus, the respect in the Westphalian system for the
sovereignty of the nation-state would continue. The law of war
envisaged the officials of a given country to be subject to
international adjudication only for crimes committed, inter alia,
against civilians in another country in times of war. The concept of
crime against humanity, though discussed in doctrine, had not yet
become actually part of international law, in a way that would
apply to the crimes committed inside the country as weft.
As the wide scope of the offences that the Germans had
committed against the Jews gradually emerged, the idea that the
persons responsible for the crimes committed within the country
too should be put on trial, started gaining ground. This step,
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