“In the autumn of 1945, the Nuremberg trial opened in the Palace of Justice in Courtroom 600. On the first day, a new word was spoken in a court of law for the first time, that word was ‘genocide’.
“It indicated the destruction of groups on grounds of race, religion or nationality. It was based on an invention by a Polish lawyer called Raphael Lemkin, and it took off. In 1948, the world’s first modern human rights treaty was adopted to prevent and to punish genocide.”
On the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials, #AJOpinion hears from British lawyer and author Philippe Sands on whether we should rethink the concept of “genocide”.
This episode was produced and edited by Al Jazeera Newsfeed’s Katya Bohdan.
