Arab League wants UNSC meeting on Israel

While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2, of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."[1] The United Nations has stated that instances of genocide have taken place throughout history, but it was not until Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide and the prosecution of perpetrators of the Holocaust at the Nuremberg trials that the international community agreed to a treaty — Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) — which defined the crime of genocide under international law. There was a gap of more than forty years between the CPPCG coming into force and the first prosecution under the provision of the treaty. To date all international prosecutions of genocide, for the Rwandan Genocide, the Srebrenica Genocide, have been by ad hoc international tribunals. The International Criminal Court came into existence in 2002 and it has the authority to try people from the states that have signed the treaty, but to date it has not tried anyone....Critics of the CPPCG point to the narrow definition of the groups that are protected under the treaty, particularly the lack of protection for political groups for what has been termed politicide. One of the problems was that until there was a body of case law from prosecutions, the precise definition of what the treaty meant had not been tested in court. For example what precisely did the term "in part" mean? As more perpetrators have been tried under international tribunals and municipal court cases, a body of legal arguments and legal interpretations are helping to address these issues. Another criticism of the CPPCG is that when it provisions have been invoked by the United Nations Security Council, they have only been invoked to punish those who have already committed genocide and been foolish enough to leave a paper trail. It was this criticism that lead to the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1674 by the United Nations Security Council on 28 April 2006 commits the Council to action to protect civilians in armed conflict and to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Genocide scholars such Gregory Stanton have postulated that conditions and acts that often occur before, during, and after genocide, such as dehumanization of victim groups, strong organization of genocidal groups, and denial of genocide by its perpetrators which can be identified and actions taken to stop genocides before they happen. Critics of this approach such as Dirk Moses think that this is unrealistic and that for example "Darfur will end when it suits the great powers that have a stake in the region".