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WHAT HE SAID AND WHAT HE WROTE
human acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions
on political, racial or religious grounds, when such acts are done
or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connexion
with any crime against peace or any war crime.
As can be seen from the definition of the crimes against
humanity, the crimes committed against the Jews would be a
subject for international adjudication even if these were committed
inside Germany. The only stipulations were that there should be a
link (nexus) between these crimes and the war, and that they
should be committed during such hostilities. Thus, the victors
could not abandon the principle that in order to be able to
intervene in the domestic affairs of a country, one had to be in a
state of war with that country. Even the extermination of the Jews
and others with a brutality unprecedented in history did not suffice
to ensure that the crimes committed in a given country would be
automatically subjected to international adjudication. Although
the term genocide had been coined by then, the genocide concept
was not elaborated among the Nuremberg Principles. The concept
of crimes against humanity embodied the crime of genocide. The
latter had not gained, at that time, enough clarity and precision to
constitute an independent crime category. The Nuremberg trials
began in October 1945 with the reading out of the indictment
against 22 Nazi defendants, and it ended a year later. Of the
defendants, 19 were convicted, 12 of whom were executed. During
the trials, the prosecutor used the term genocide from time to time
but the verdict did not refer to that crime.
The U.N. General Assembly Resolution No. 96 (1)
The first document of a legal nature containing the term
genocide was Resolution No. 96 adopted by the United Nations
General Assembly in December 1946 soon after the Nuremberg
trials ended-in fact, during the first session it held in the wake of
the trials. The purpose of that resolution was, as specified in the
last paragraph, to demand that the ECOSOC prepare a draft
convention on genocide in a year. But, on this occasion, the
General Assembly explained what it understood from the word
genocide. It was “a denial of the right of existence of entire human
groups”. That was likened to homicide as it was “the denial of the
right to live of individual human beings”. The reference made to the
right to life, later, caused a link to be formed between human rights
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