A/HRC/40/33 36. William Schabas, professor of international law at Middlesex University and of human rights law and international criminal law at Leiden University, highlighted that the Convention had been drafted and adopted as a response to the fact that genocide had occurred throughout history, rather than as a response to the Second World War specifically, as had been the case for the Charter of the United Nations, which made explicit reference to the two world wars. In fact, in its resolution 96 (I) on the crime of genocide, the General Assembly stated that many instances of such crimes had occurred. In the preamble to the Convention, the contracting States recognized that, at all periods of history, genocide had inflicted great losses on humanity. Indeed, the twentieth century had begun with the genocide against the Herero in German South-West Africa, as acknowledged in 2017 by the German parliament. The international community had spoken of genocide when referring to the 1915 atrocities committed against the Armenian population under the Ottoman Empire, which had been condemned at the time by France, the Russian Empire and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and were referred to as crimes against humanity and defined as massacres in the 1920 Peace Treaty of Sèvres. Subsequent to the adoption of the Convention, other genocides had been committed, including in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda, as had been recognized by international courts such as the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. 37. Mr. Schabas noted that Winston Churchill had been right when he had said that genocide was a crime without a name, which indeed it had been until Raphael Lemkin invented the word. Mr. Lemkin’s vision of genocide was broader than the definition found in the Convention itself. In particular, Mr. Schabas believed that genocide encompassed a range of punishable acts that corresponded more closely to the present understanding of the crime against humanity of persecution. However, in 1948 many members of the United Nations had been reluctant to go that far because of their own history of acts of persecution and oppression against minorities within their borders. Thus, while the Convention had been criticized for its narrowness, it should be kept in mind that it was a compromise reached in 1948 at the dawn of modern international human rights law. It was the first convention within the United Nations human rights system. 38. Mr. Schabas observed that the Convention was narrow, in as much as it referred to a national, ethnical, racial or religious group and not to a range of other groups. In that regard, Mr. Lemkin had been in agreement with the drafters, as he had seen the Convention as an extension or a correction of the range of treaties and other instruments aimed at protecting national minorities that had been adopted in the aftermath of the First World War. 39. At the same time, the Convention was a reflection of an understanding broadly shared by the members of the United Nations at the time, that the atrocities of the Second World War had been the result of a more deep-seated flaw in humanity, namely the belief in a particular racial group as superior or inferior to another. That had led to the Holocaust – the Shoah of the Second World War – and had also manifested itself in other forms of discrimination such as slavery, the slave trade and colonialism. 40. For 40 years following the adoption of the Convention, international criminal law had been largely stagnant and the Convention had been the only instrument of significance in the field. In parallel, human rights law had continued to evolve. The 1990s had seen a dramatic change, with the renaissance of international criminal law. However, while there had been phenomenal legal development particularly in relation to the definition of crimes, such as the extension of war crimes to cover non-international armed conflict and the understanding that crimes against humanity could also be committed during peacetime, paradoxically, the definition of genocide had been left unchanged. It was as if the Convention had been put on a pedestal as a monument to legal development. 41. Mr. Schabas noted that, with the adoption of the Rome Statute and the “responsibility to protect” resolutions, in which no significant distinction was made between the crime of genocide and crimes against humanity, the concept of genocide in the Convention might have become less significant. That might explain, but not excuse, the failure by many States to ratify the Convention. There had only been 10 new ratifications 8