Uluslararası ve Ulusal Ceza Hukukunda soykırım suçu
Özet
The inhuman acts started in Germany before the Second World War and realized by the Nazis during the war in all the European territories that were occupied led Polish jurist Lemkin to identify and disclose the acts in question. The term "genocide" was first coined by Lemkin and used to refer to the annihilation of a community and people. Although the Nuremberg tribunal, which was established to try the war criminals by the victorious states at the end of the war, did not refer to the crime of genocide, the acts that were covered in the trial were technically considered genocide. Following the trials, states initiated preparations under the United Nations for an international convention for the punishment and prevention of genocide, in order to prevent such crimes from being committed again. These preparations were concluded in two years and the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was opened for signatures in 1948. The convention stipulates some acts intenting to partially or wholly destroy the ethnic, racial, religious or national groups and regulated that such acts will be criminalized by the signatory states, which are to fight effectively against such acts. Turkey became a party to the Convention in 1950 and genocide was criminalized in 2005 under the Turkish Penal Code number 5237. After the convention came into force, it was not implemented for a long time. However, in the statutes of international courts established with regards to the crimes committed in Rwanda and former Yugoslavian territories in the beginning of 1990s, the crime of genocide was accepted as a punishable act, in line with its definition in the Convention. Following the trials, the courts ruled for imprisonment due to the crime of genocide. The rulings of the court made significant contributions to the definitions of the concepts used in the Convention. The Convention was also brought to the International Court of Justice and was used in 2007 for the resolution of the conflict between Bosnia and Serbia. In this ruling, the International Court of Justice made an unprecedented interpretation of the Convention, taking the debates during the preparations into account, and made a controversial ruling stating that the states are obliged not to commit acts that can be defined as genocide, along with their obligation to prevent and punish genocide. The crime of genocide in the Turkish Penal Code is the same in definition as in the Convention but differs from the international case law through including the condition that the acts constituting genocide should be realized in line with a plan.