9 December 2023 is the 75th anniversary of the passing of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (known as the UN Convention on Genocide). The international convention was passed by a newly created UN in response to the murder by the Nazis of millions of men, women and children because they were Jewish, in what has become known as the Holocaust.

The convention was a clear statement by the international community that crimes of that nature could not happen again.

In those 75 intervening years the use of the word genocide has become far more well known while its specificity has sometimes become blurred. Likewise the determination of a global society not to let such things happen again has become mired in cross-nation politics, governmental realignments and conflict fatigue. So 75 years on, what importance and significance does the Convention have and what does it mean for today?

Webinar series, 22 November–17 January

To ask these questions and to explore the importance of the UN Convention we have arranged a mini webinar series led by three of the UK’s leading experts in this field, Dr Rebecca Jinks, of Royal Holloway, University of London, Professor Jean-Marc Dreyfus, The University of Manchester and Dr Alex Korb of University of Leicester.

The five talks form a series to mark this historic piece of international legislation, while each talk will also be a standalone lecture and accessed as such.

‘Such acts shock the conscience of mankind’: The creation of the UN Convention on Genocide (1948)
Dr Rebecca Jinks
Wednesday 22 November, 6.30pm
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Beware of the G. word. The concept of genocide since 1945
Professor Jean-Marc Dreyfus
Wednesday 29 November, 6.30pm
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‘Never Again’: How Holocaust memorialisation has influenced the memorialisation of other genocides
Dr Rebecca Jinks
Wednesday 6 December, 6.30pm
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Newly announced sessions:

How the Nazis used the term genocide
Dr Alex Korb
Wednesday 10 January, 6.30pm
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How the Nuremberg Trials have, and have not, forged International Law
Dr Alex Korb
Wednesday 17 January, 6.30pm
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This webinar series will be free and open for all to attend live. Recordings of the sessions will be made available on-demand to HA members. 

About the speakers

Dr Rebecca Jinks is a historian of comparative genocide and humanitarianism at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm?, which examines the ways in which representations of the Holocaust have influenced how other genocides are understood and represented, focusing on the ‘canonical’ cases of genocide – Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Her current research project, ‘Genocidal Captivity’, is funded by the AHRC and explores the experiences of Armenian and Yezidi women genocide survivors in 1915 and 2014.

Professor Jean-Marc Dreyfus is a Professor at the University of Manchester. He is a specialist of the economic and diplomatic aspects of the Holocaust and of post-war reparations. Dreyfus also works on looted art in the Holocaust and the unfinished restitution process. He currently writes a monograph on the French mission in search of deportees’ corpses in Germany from 1946 to 1960. His last book is a family biography of Vollrath von Maltzan, the first West-German Ambassador to Paris after World War II (Vollrath. De Hitler à Adenauer. Un ambassadeur entre deux mondes: Paris, Vendémiaire, 2021). With Audrey Kechelewski, he is the co-director of the Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, the older running Holocaust journal (created in 1945).

Alexander Korb is Associate Professor at the University of Leicester and member of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He has published widely on Nazism and the Holocaust, on Collaboration in Eastern Europe and on European identity within fascism. In a current project, he looks at the transformation of criminal law in Germany between 1918 and 1935. His publications include Intertwined Genocides: Mass Violence in Western Yugoslavia During the Second World War (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2024), which was awarded the Wiener Holocaust Library’s Fraenkel Prize, ‘Mass Violence in Eastern and Southeastern Europa, 1938-1949’ (with Dieter Pohl) in The Routledge History Handbook of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, 2022, and (as editor) Barbara Yelin's biographical novel of the Holocaust survivor Emmie Arbel: Die Farbe der Erinnerung, 2023.