Abstract

It's more and more recognized the role that Raphael Lemkin had in the implementation and approval of the UN Genocide Convention in 1948. The article runs through the years Lemkin spent in Poland, his studies in international law, his participation in international law congresses until his escape from occupied Poland and his arrival in the United States, where he invented the term "genocide". Same attention is given to debate during the interwars decades on the laws of war and how the international community dealt with the rules of The Hague and Geneva. The attention of Lemkin toward the massacres of Armenians within World War I and the analysis of what was going on during the Second World War with the destruction of the Jews from the Nazism were essential to the making of the concept of genocide, that Lemkin interpreted in a broader way respect the final result of the Convention.