A simple symmetry question. If a society makes denying a past genocide a criminal offence — and Germany does, via § 130 (3) of the Criminal Code1 — then in that same society, naming a present genocide must at least be sayable. Otherwise the law is folklore: sacred backwards, taboo forwards.
The term itself was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish jurist, in 1944, and he was a key author of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.2 The Convention is not ambiguous. Article II defines genocide as specific acts „committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such" — killing, serious bodily or mental harm, deliberate conditions of life calculated to bring about destruction, prevention of births, forcible transfer of children.3
Lemkin did not coin the term as a gift to future generations. He coined it because every other word — massacre, pogrom, ethnic cleansing — felt too small to him during the Shoah, and because a society that cannot name a crime cannot prohibit it. The term is a tool. It is meant to be used.
Three cases, legally placed
Gaza
On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, in South Africa v. Israel (Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide), found that at least some of the rights asserted by South Africa under the Genocide Convention are plausible — namely the right of Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts identified in Article II of the Convention.4 The Court ordered six provisional measures, including the obligation for Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts under Article II(a)–(d), and to prevent and punish „direct and public incitement to commit genocide".4
„Plausible risk of genocide" is not „genocide proven" — the merits phase is still pending. But it is the highest international court establishing that the threshold for taking the term seriously here has been crossed. Add to that the position of Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories5, and the joint statement of genocide and Holocaust scholars — including Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, Raz Segal — who consider the threshold met.6
Uyghurs in Xinjiang
Several parliaments and governments have officially designated the actions of the People's Republic of China against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as genocide: the United States (State Department, January 2021)7, Canada (House of Commons, February 2021, unanimous 266:0)8, the Netherlands (parliament, February 2021)9, the United Kingdom (House of Commons, April 2021, unanimous)10. The German federal government has so far not adopted this designation.
Tigray
The Tigray war (2020–2022) was the subject of an explicit concern in the final report of the UN-mandated International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia in 2023: that acts by all parties — particularly Eritrean forces and the Ethiopian government — may constitute crimes against humanity or genocide.11 The report is clear enough to justify the term. International attention was nevertheless limited.
Salgado, Rwanda, Yugoslavia
Wim Wenders' documentary The Salt of the Earth (2014) follows the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.12 Since the late 1980s, Salgado has documented the great catastrophes of the late 20th century — including the Rwandan genocide of 1994, whose elements were later established by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the Yugoslav wars, in the course of which the Srebrenica massacre was confirmed as genocide both by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and by the ICJ.13
Salgado returned a year after his Rwanda photographs to follow Hutu refugees in the camps. In the film he describes — and this is the only scene where his voice breaks — how at what he saw he lost faith in humanity and believed he had to stop photographing.
Anyone who has seen Salgado's images knows: the word genocide is not too big. It is exactly right. And its use — by courts, by special rapporteurs, by scholarly consortiums — is not activism. It is the duty of states party to the Convention.3
Consequence
The Genocide Convention contains, in Article I, an obligation of prevention and of punishment.3 Both presuppose that the crime is named. A government that avoids the term out of foreign-policy deference violates the Convention's spirit. A public that experiences the word as extreme has understood the Shoah and Lemkin's work sentimentally rather than legally.
§ 130 of the German Criminal Code says: denying past genocides is criminal. The UN Convention says: preventing present genocides is a duty. Together: calling a genocide a genocide — when the legal criteria are met or are made plausible by competent bodies — is not radical. It is the precondition for the Convention to function at all.
Those who stay silent here are not protecting diplomacy. They are quietly suspending the very definition we committed to after 1945.