Samenvatting

Could one imagine that up until the mid-1940s international treaties had been ratified on postal services, copyright protection, and whale hunting, but not on genocide? It was only after the Second World War that the deliberate and systematic destruction of groups was recognised as an international crime. There had not even been a name for this practice, which has existed since the beginning of humanity. The 1948 Genocide Convention, the first human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations, was a milestone in the international protection of human rights, although several tragedies have shown that mere law is not sufficient to relegate genocide to the scrapheap of history. The initiator of the Convention was not a very well-known man. This article is about the struggle of Raphael Lemkin, who had, with unflagging zeal, devoted his life to the elimination of genocide.