Genocide is distinguishable from all other crimes by the motivation behind it. Towards the end of the Second World War, when the full horror of the extermination and concentration camps became public knowledge, Winston Church was noted for saying that the world was being brought face to face with "a crime that has no name."

History had a hard time in recognizing a term to fully describe the crimes that took place in Nazi Germany. There simply had not been anything like it before, neither in nature or to the degree of which it was happening. Raphaël Lemkin, the adviser to the United States War Ministry, took notice that the world was being confronted with such an unprecedented phenomena and decided that "new conceptions require new terminology." In 1944, he put together the word `genocide'; stemming from the Greek word `genos' meaning race or tribe and the Latin...