When do large-scale killings constitute genocide?
The term genocide has been in the news recently, in particular in connection with China’s treatment of its ethnic Uighur population. But as Imogen Foulkes writes, the restrictive definition of the word makes applying the term anything but easy.
This content was published on April 6, 2021 - 15:00
April 6, 2021 - 15:00
Imogen Foulkes
We’ve just come to the end of another lengthy session of the UN Human Rights Council, at which some very grave human rights situations were addressed: Myanmar, South Sudan, Syria, North Korea, Belarus…and much more. No country, let’s be honest, has a perfect human rights record – when the council discussed systemic racism, it focused with good reason on recent events in the United States. Its latest reports on child poverty have shown the United Kingdom in a less than flattering light.
Healthy prisoners are euthanised so their internal organs can be removed and sold on a lucrative multibillion-dollar black market. Women are raped, abused and beaten. Hundreds of thousands are forcibly sterilised to prevent pregnancies, in a bid to wipe out the future population. Many people enter these camps, dragged from their homes and rounded up by troops and forced into trucks, vanishing into a complex network of prisons. Few ever re-emerge. And Beijing staunchly disputes the horrifying allegations that have been outlined in a growing number of independent reports for several years now. But the United States has just declared it a clear case of genocide and crimes against humanity - and those five significant words have backed Australia into a very unpleasant corner.
Overview
It is widely recognized that the environmental justice movement first gained traction in 1982 in a predominately African-American community in Warren County, North Carolina. University of Michigan professors Bunyan Bryant (a graduate of EMU) and Paul Mohai were pioneers in the movement. Bunyan Bryant who in 1972 had become the first African American to join the SNRE faculty attended a meeting at the Federation of Southern Cooperative in Sumter County. Shortly after, he joined with Professor Mohai in Ann Arbor.
In the early 1990s, during the Clinton years, it was the period when the environmental justice concept “hit the radar” of the EPA and federal government. Professors Byrant and Mohai led a team of academics and activists to advise the U.S. EPA on environmental justice policy. Drs. Bryant and Mohai published