Genocidal intent is the '' mens rea'' for the crime of genocide. "Intent to destroy" is one of the elements of the crime of

genocide Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the ...

according to the 1948

Genocide Convention The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention, is an international treaty that criminalizes genocide and obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition. It wa ...

. There are some analytic differences between the concept of intent under national criminal law, where responsibility for a murder is ascribed to an individual based on their mental state, and international law. Under international law, responsibility falls upon individuals in their capacities as members of certain organizations or other official roles. The intent for genocide is less direct. An international court might look at whether the defendant participated in planning the genocidal acts, perhaps within the auspices of a certain organizational structure, or whether they acted with knowledge of such a preconceived plan. The Tribunal for Rwanda, in one of their cases, decided that it was not enough for a defendant to know that their acts could contribute to the destruction of a group. Scholars have suggested that the individual's role within an institution can impact the weight given to an individual's knowledge. In order to prosecute of an individual in the context of a genocide, their complicity in forming the "institutional intent" must also be proved. The

International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal ...

(ICTY), International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and

International Court of Justice The International Court of Justice (ICJ; french: Cour internationale de justice, links=no; ), sometimes known as the World Court, is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN). It settles disputes between states in accordan ...

have ruled that, in the absence of a confession, genocidal intent can be proven with circumstantial evidence, especially "the scale of atrocities committed, their general nature, in a region or a country, or furthermore, the fact of deliberately and systematically targeting victims on account of their membership of a particular group, while excluding the members of other groups."

Cases

In 2010, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal referred to the precedent of the ICTR in discussing the role of genocidal intent. In the case of a 2004 United Nations ''Commission of Inquiry'' into the War in Darfur, Claus Kress argued that the ICTY and ICTR were incorrect in their view of the genocidal intent of individuals. Hans Vest argued for the interlinked roles of an individual's intent and the individual's expectation of contributing to a collective action. Kjell Anderson discussed ways of separating out the roles of collective policies and their interaction with individual intent. Olaf Jenssen disagreed with the lack of sentencing Goran Jelisić for genocidal intent, arguing that legal consistency would imply that some of the perpetrators of the Holocaust would not have been convicted for genocide. In February 2021, while the Tigray War was in its fourth month, peace researcher

Kjetil Tronvoll Kjetil Tronvoll is a peace and conflict studies researcher, specialising in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Zanzibar. , he is a professor of peace and conflict studies at Bjørknes University College and heads a consultancy firm ''Oslo Analytica''. Childh ...

stated that the Eritrean Defence Forces' acts of widespread and systematic executions of Tigrayan civilians, especially men and boys, sexual violence against Tigrayan women, looting and destruction of infrastructure and food resources, and looting and destruction of Tigrayan cultural heritage, together seemed to show a pattern that might establish genocidal intent.

Denial

Edina Bećirević studied whether there was a "special intent" by the Serbian political leadership to exterminate Bosnian Muslims as early as 1992" in the Bosnian War.

References

{{International criminal law Elements of crime Genocide Intention

Cases

Denial

See also

References