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Calling Genocide By Its Rightful Name: Lemkin's Word, Darfur, And The Un Report, David Luban
Calling Genocide By Its Rightful Name: Lemkin's Word, Darfur, And The Un Report, David Luban
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
When the United Nations commission investigating Darfur issued its report in January 2005, it concluded that the Darfur atrocities represented war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not genocide. This had the harmful effect of deflating efforts to mobilize political support to halt the Darfur atrocities. But the Commission's conclusion was based entirely on technicalities in the legal definitions of the international crimes, not on denial that extermination is going on in Darfur. In this paper, the author argues that the legal and popular meanings of genocide have diverged in harmful ways: where laymen understand that mass killings and rapes …