2:00 – 4:00 PM at the National Hellenic Museum
Cost: $15 non-members, $10 NHM, $5 students
The Refugee Crisis by Hannibal Travis
Hannibal Travis is a professor of law at Florida International University College of Law. He is the author of Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudan (Carolina Academic, 2010), The Assyrian Genocide: Cultural and Political Legacies (Routledge, 2017), , and ‘‘On the Original Understanding of the Crime of Genocide,’’ GSP 7.1 (2012).
Genocide by deportation facilitates denial of the crime. Few could deny that genocide by direct killing of a racial or religious group would constitute a massive crime. Yet in the context of contemporary genocides, international criminal tribunals and legal experts have doubted that there was genocidal intent on the part of states or state actors where most of a genocide’s mortality resulted from forced displacement. This talk explores whether genocide may take place by means of deportation into circumstances of life bringing about large-scale premature deaths from hunger, disease, exposure, and homelessness. It covers various case studies of genocide that have contributed to the drafting or interpretation of Article II(c) and II(e) of the Genocide Convention, including the Ottoman Christian genocide, the Holocaust, the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and genocide in Iraq and Sudan. The talk concludes with an analysis of circumstances in which deportation and forced relocation could give rise to a finding of genocidal intent, whether by courts, legislatures, or heads of state.
