International Human Rights

1. International Human Rights Genocide, War Crimes, and Crimes against humanity

2. Human Rights Internationally International law has to do with the relationships between sovereign states Historically, it was inappropriate to interfere with the actions of a sovereign state In our increasingly globalized world, humanitarian concerns have led to encroaching a nation’s borders to stop inhumane acts

3. Refugees People who have escaped from their homeland due to persecution or justifiable fear of persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Political asylum – protection given by one country to refugees from another

4. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees In 1951, Canada signed the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which outlined who qualifies as a refugee and the kind of legal protection and rights that refugees are entitled to in their host country. excluded from the refugee status are those persons who have committed serious crimes, including either war crimes or crimes against humanity.

5. Genocide, War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity Genocide - the act of killing, or causing serious harm with the intent to destroy, national, ethnic, or religious groups. “The crime without a name” – Winston Churchill War crimes – include acts of torture, inhuman treatment, etc. Crimes against humanity – an act of violence that is committed as part of a full-scale or systematic attack on a civil population. Can include torture, rape and enslavement.

6. An excerpt from The Genocide Convention at Fifty by William Schabas The destruction of ethnic groups has marred the progress of human history almost from its beginnings. There are reports of genocide-like massacres in the writings of the ancient Greeks and in the history of the Middle Ages. Indigenous populations in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and elsewhere were sometimes slated for elimination by their "discoverers" or their colonizers. But ethnic massacre truly seems to have flourished in the twentieth century. The first great genocide of the era dates to the First World War when hundreds of thousands of Armenians were destroyed despite the protests of Western diplomats who, possibly for the first time, called such killings a "crime against humanity." In the Second World War, after nearly a decade of mounting anti-Semitism, Hitler undertook what he called the "final solution," reminding his generals that "nobody remembers the Armenians."Churchill called it "the crime without a name," and it was only in 1944 that a Jewish refugee from Poland teaching in the United States, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term genocide in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Lemkin's neologism was rapidly accepted. In 1945, the Nuremberg prosecutors charged genocide in the indictment of Goering, Hess and the others, although the judges of the International Military Tribunal kept with the official terminology used in their statute and described the Nazi atrocities as "crimes against humanity." After the Nuremberg judgment, the UN General Assembly declared genocide an international crime and directed that a treaty aimed at its prevention and punishment be drafted.

7. Darfur Conflict Overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USLDoIiFzzg Read: Sudan’s Darfur Conflict handout Discussion: Is this a genocide according to the international definition?

8. The Devil Came on Horseback

9. On Our Watch The world vowed "never again" after the genocide in Rwanda and the atrocities in Srebrenica, Bosnia. Then came Darfur. Over the past four years, at least 200,000 people have been killed, 2.5 million driven from their homes, and mass rape has been used as a weapon in a brutal campaign supported by the Sudanese government. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdR9SB4yPOo

10. Ghosts of Rwanda Student Worksheet Jigsaw Groups Watch video: http://vimeo.com/25257006 Debrief questions Group discussion

11. Other refugee cases Palestine/Israel conflict: “Asking Key Questions” on page 485-6 Suresh v. Canada p.486