A/HRC/40/33 I. Introduction 1. Pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 37/26, on 13 September 2018, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) organized a high-level panel discussion to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted in 1948. The panel was chaired and moderated by the President of the Human Rights Council, Vojislav Šuc. Following opening statements by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Armenia, Zohrab Mnatsakanyan, the high-level panel was organized around the remarks of four panellists, followed by an interactive dialogue with the participation of 22 members of the United Nations and 7 observers and concluding remarks by the panellists and the Chair. 2. The panellists were Adama Dieng, Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide, Kimberly Prost, judge of the International Criminal Court, William Schabas, professor of international law at Middlesex University and of human rights law and international criminal law at Leiden University, and Fabián Salvioli, Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence. II. Opening statements 3. In her opening statement, the High Commissioner gave a special welcome to the panellists, highlighting their enormous breadth of knowledge and expertise. She noted that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide had been the first human rights treaty to be adopted by the General Assembly. The twin events of the adoption of the Convention on 9 December 1948 and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the next day had marked the start of a new era of human rights, with a vision of a world in which the genocide of the Holocaust, and the stripping of multiple human rights that it constituted, would never happen again. However, as the High Commissioner reminded the Council, the “odious scourge” of genocide, as the Convention itself described it, remained both a threat and a reality in the twenty-first century, as evidenced by the report of the independent international fact-finding mission on Myanmar on the military-led campaign of murder, rape and assault against the Rohingya people (A/HRC/39/64). She noted the conservative estimates of 10,000 dead, countless more bereaved, maimed, raped and traumatized and of the nearly three-quarters of a million people forced to flee to Bangladesh. 4. The High Commissioner stated that, 70 years after the adoption of the Convention, the gravity of recent acts perpetrated against the Rohingya and against the Yazidis left no doubt that the Convention mattered as much currently as it did when it was adopted. The international community must take stock and hold those responsible to account. Beyond providing justice for victims and punishment for perpetrators, accountability mattered, because ending impunity was central to ending the crime of genocide. Impunity was an enabler of genocide and accountability its nemesis. Since punishment was key to prevention, those stated twin aims of the Convention should not be seen in isolation from each other. Under international human rights law, accountability included effective, prompt, thorough and impartial investigations, prosecutions, access to justice and effective remedies for victims. To that effect, the United Nations approach embraced initiatives ranging from fact-finding exercises to judicial processes. 5. The High Commissioner referred to the major joint study conducted by the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence and the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide on the contribution of transitional justice to the prevention of gross violations and abuses of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law, including genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and their recurrence (A/HRC/37/65). The central message of the study was clear, namely that transitional justice processes contributed to the prevention of violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian 2