402 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )the First World War. Th e painful memories of the League’s failures saw to
that. Still, there were hopes that the UN might take eff ective steps to cement
the gains that had been made, and to ensure that the tragedies of the past
would not be repeated. In no areas were these hopes more earnest than in
human-rights law and international criminal law. Activity in both of these
areas was soon under way.
Th e initial fruits were two initiatives that were brought before the UN
General Assembly on successive days in December 1948. Th e fi rst was an
international convention that created a new international crime: genocide.
Th e word “genocide” (meaning the killing of a people) was a new coinage of
the 1940s, by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin. State that became
parties to this convention pledged themselves to “prevent and punish” this
new kind of horror.
Th e following day came the assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declara-
tion of Human Rights. Its draft ers included Eleanor Roo se velt, a member
of the American delegation to the UN; the French lawyer (and future Nobel
Peace Prize winner) René Cassin, who had been a war time legal adviser to
Charles de Gaulle; and the Canadian lawyer John P. Humphrey, who took
the lead part in the draft ing. Th e declaration contained a list of fundamental
civil and po liti cal liberties, such as liberty of expression, of association, of
religion, and so forth. It was not a treaty as the Genocide Convention was,
but merely a resolution of the UN General Assembly. Th at meant, crucially,
that the declaration was not legally binding. It was merely an agreed state-
ment of worthy aspirations.
At this same time, work was getting under way in the I.L.C. to create a
permanently existing international criminal tribunal, comparable to those
of Nuremberg and Tokyo, to deal with future international miscreants. Th e
most immediate task, the commission decided, was the draft ing of a written
international criminal code for the tribunal to apply. By 1954, it had pro-
duced a draft , containing twelve crimes, including war crimes and various
aggression- related acts, plus genocide and crimes against humanity.
Two other early postwar human- rights initiatives may be briefl y noted. In
1949, a thoroughgoing updating of the Geneva Conventions was completed.
Under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross, a set of
four new Geneva Conventions was concluded in 1949. Th ree of these were
updates, with only modest revision, of prewar provisions— on the protec-