ICC NOTE: The label of genocide is one which becomes somewhat of a political football when initially considered. Rwanda in 1994 was not labeled genocide even though 800,000 people were slaughtered for ethnic cleansing. The main reason was due to a fear of an obligation to act by the nation which labeled it genocide. The same situation is present today as the Islamic State continues to target religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East for extermination. The United States and Europe have both been coy towards calling it genocide as action would be required under the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The decision which looms over both the European Union and the United States will be one that will have long term consequences regardless of its direction. 

2/1/2016 Syria (The Economist) – IS IT accurate and/or expedient to use the word “genocide” to describe the persecution of religious minorities by the terrorist group known as Islamic State, Daesh or a variant of that name? Hypothetical as it might seem, that question is a real dilemma for people in high places in western Europe and America.

On January 20th, Federica Mogherini, the foreign-policy chief of the European Union, gave a speech to the European Parliament in which she deplored the suffering of Christians and other minority faiths in the Middle East but carefully stopped short of using the word genocide, to the great disappointment of many MEPs and religious-freedom campaigners.

Those campaigners took heart when another Strasbourg-based body of legislators, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), took a much firmer position. PACE is an arm of the 47-nation Council of Europe. The European Parliament, an organ of the 28-nation European Union and rather more important, will also vote on the IS-and-genocide question in a few days’ time. The PACE resolution, passed on January 27th, denounced the wave of terror attacks on civilians in Europe and the Middle East and added:

…Many of these recent terrorist attacks are claimed by, and may be attributed to, individuals who act in the name of the terrorist entity which calls itself Da’ish and who have perpetrated acts of genocide and other serious crimes punishable under international law. States should act on the presumption that Da’ish commits genocide and should be aware that this entails action under the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

In America, too, there is top-level hand-wringing about the question of whether or not to accuse IS of the ultimate crime. It was reported late last year that the Obama administration might soon designate as genocide the persecution of the Yazidis, a religious minority in Iraq whom IS call devil-worshippers. This followed a study by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, arguing that IS’s treatment of the Yazidis amounted to an attempted extermination.

That prompted a group of 30 bishops and scholars, representing an impressively broad span of American Christianity, to write to the administration, insisting that the word applied as much to atrocities against their co-religionists in the Middle East as it did to those against the Yazidis.

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