The concept of genocide originated in international law with the adoption of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The Convention was unanimously ratified by the United Nations General Assembly's Resolution 260 A (III) dated December 9, 1948, and entered into force on January 12, 1951.

The Genocide Convention is the first human rights convention adopted by the UN General Assembly. Immediately after, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was voted and ratified in the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948.

The unanimous ratification of the Genocide Convention reveals the common aspiration of the international community and the importance it attaches to the prevention of genocide in order not to re-experience suffering of World War II.

Currently, 152 states are party to the Convention, to which our country has also been a party since 1951.

The crime of genocide is defined in the second article of the Convention. According to this, genocide is defined as: "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such :

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

As can be understood from the second article, the presence of material and moral elements is required in order to consider the crime of genocide.

Material Elements: (The acts listed here are limited. In other words, acts other than these acts do not constitute the material element of the crime of genocide.)

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures to prevent births within the group;
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Moral Element: The moral element of the crime of genocide is intent. On the other hand, in order to ensure the moral element, the perpetrator must have a special intent (dolus specialis) to destroy a group, in whole or in part.

The fundamental element that distinguishes genocide from other crimes is that its victims are primarily targeted not individually but because they are members of a particular group.

The punishable acts are enumerated in the third article of the Convention, which are:

• Genocide;
• Conspiracy to commit genocide;
• Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
• Attempt to commit genocide ;
• Complicity in genocide.
• Article 6 of the Convention stipulates that persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article 3 shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction.
• Today, the crime of genocide is described as "the crime of crimes". With this concept, both the necessity of punishing this crime in the most severe way and the fact that not every act consisting of a crime can be included in this scope are emphasised.