Cambodian genocide: Critically assess the international communitys response to the Cambodian Genocide - Essay Example

partly and this can be seen in the Cambodian case where the people were forced to leave the cities which led to many deaths from starvation and exhaustion.1 Therefore, the mass killings that the ethnic Khmers were subjected to cannot be considered as genocide under the definition that is provided by the Convention since these people do not represent a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The genocide convention represented a significant step towards establishing an individual accountability for any violations of the international law by compelling the signatories to prevent and punish the acts that are committed with the motive of in whole or in part a national, ethnic, religious or racial group.

According to the strict definitions of genocide that are contained in the convention, it does not consider the massacre that took place in Cambodia as genocide even though almost a fifth of the population was killed in various ways. This is because the convention has a limited scope of the protected classes where it lists them as national, ethnic, racial and religious groups and this therefore makes the ECCC rule that the definition of genocide does not cover a substantial portion of the deaths that took place in Cambodia.

A prolonged debate culminated in the exclusion of political groups from the Article 2 as a compromise that is born from politics and the will to shield political leaders from scrutiny and liability that might take place when bodies that are political try to reduce the principles that guide the customary law to expressions that are positivistic and the article is of the opinion that there is no legal principle that can be employed to justify this blind spot.2 The exclusion of political groups from the Genocide Convention goes against the customary ius cogens prohibition of genocide that protects the political groups as well as the national, ethnic, religious and racial groups and this argument brings out another definition of crime that is not