Raphael Lemkin

Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Second Edition by the Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. Raphael Lemkin

With a new introduction by Samantha Power, lecturer in public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and author of "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. A title in The Lawbook Exchange series, Foundations of the Laws of War, General Editor Joseph Perkovich. In this pathbreaking study Polish emigre Raphael Lemkin [1900-1959] coined the term "genocide" and defined it is a subject of international law. While the term has come to mean the extermination of a people, Lemkin used it to describe all programs that sought to increase "Aryan" birthrate while working to exterminate the social, cultural and economic independence of non-Germanic peoples. This study was an elaboration of ideas he first proposed in 1933 in his address to the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law (1933), which argued that attacks on racial, religious and ethnic groups should be considered international crimes. Important for the prosecution of the Nazis, it helped to establish the framework for all subsequent efforts to punish crimes against humanity.