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In an episode that may comprise the 21^st century’s clearest case of genocide so far, on August 3, 2014, ISIS troops invaded Sinjar, the central location of the Yazidi people, as well as the location of many important Yazidi cultural and religious sites.  By nightfall, Sinjar was effectively under ISIS control. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 Yazidis – mostly men and elderly women – were killed. Approximately 6,000 – mostly women and children (both male and female) – were taken captive, to be held and sold as slaves, and then subject to repeated rape and beatings.  Young boys were pressed into military service as early as the age of seven. Tens of thousands fled the city to surrounding areas.

ISIS and their allies intentionally targeted the Yazidi – an ethnic and religious group – for destruction.  Their acts corresponded precisely with those enumerated in the UN Genocide Convention: killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction,” preventing births, and forcibly transferring children from one group to another.

As of July 2019, the risk of continued persecution – and even genocide – remains acute.  Although ISIS has been officially defeated, not a single conspirator or perpetrator of the genocide has been brought to justice – and hardly any even tried.  Extremists claiming to adhere to ISIS’s ideology continue to threaten people in the region.  Local communities – mostly comprised of Sunni Arabs – who collaborated with ISIS in the violence against the Yazidi live on in the area with impunity.  Iraqi and Kurdish forces struggle with one another for access to and control over the area around Sinjar, neither demonstrating a commitment to prioritizing the security of the Yazidis. Access to education, health services, jobs, and basic needs is poor, particularly for the Yazidi.

“Before It’s Too Late – A Report Concerning the Ongoing Genocide and Persecution by the Yazidis in Iraq, and Their Need for Immediate Protection” was launched on July 30, 2019, a few days before the fifth anniversary of the onset of the genocide against the Yazidi people.  The report spells out the risks and challenges confronting the Yazidis of Iraq in simple, legally relevant terms, with reference to certain fundamental rights laid out in the UN Charter on Human Rights and to the Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes developed by the UN Office of the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide.

Two of the lead authors of the Persecution Prevention Project report – Melinda Taylor and Sareta Ashraph – participated in a symposium entitled “The Yazidi Genocide: Prosecution, Protection, and Preservation,” hosted by the Genocide Studies Program in April 2019. The report reflects several of the insights gleaned at that symposium.

Resources for inquiries regarding “Before It’s Too Late”

AUGUST 2020

In the spring 2020 term at Yale, students in David Simon’s “Mass Atrocities and Global Politics” seminar composed a policy report, directed to the U.S. Department of State (indeed, predicated upon a mythical request for policy advice from the Secretary of State).  On the sixth anniversary of the gencoidal attach on Sinjar, an edited version of that report, called “TOWARDS JUSTICE AND SECURITY: PRINCIPLES AND POLICIES FOR THE YAZIDI IN 2020 AND BEYOND”, is now available, here.

With the adoption of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, genocide became a crime under international law. The convention also mandates that signatories of the convention incorporate the criminalization of genocide into their own legal code.  Although the punitive element of the convention as not invoked until the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda (the ICTY and ICTR, respectively) did so in the late 1990s, a considerable body of jurisprudence has developed both prior to and since then.

The development of a regime of justice related to genocide is most apparent in international law: While the ICTY and ICTR have made several convictions of genocide between them.  The International Court of Justice has made a determination that genocide did occur in Srebenica (and that the government of Serbia was legally complicit in failing to prevent Bosnian Serb militias from committing genocide despite the knowledge and means of doing so). The partially international Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has brought genocide-related charges as well.  The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for the arrest of Omar Bashir, president of Sudan, on genocide charges.

The national realm of justice ought not to be overlooked as well, though.  In several South American countries, genocide law includes “political groups” among those to be protected from intent to destroy. Other judges have considered invoking universal jurisdiction to indict individuals living outside their national realm for crimes against others outside their national realm for crimes committed outside their national realm.

Meanwhile, in countries that have experienced genocide, justice is not restricted to the use of the genocide convention.  National courts have considered both genocide and genocide-related charges (such as crimes against humanity, or simply murder, in the context of widespread mass violence) in several places.  Rwanda’s gacaca courts, created at the grassroots level, ultimately heard almost two million trials related to the 1994 genocide.