A United Nations sub-committee today began a closed discussion of amendments to the “genocide resolution” which calls for the outlawing of mass extermination of religious or racial groups as an international crime for which states, statesmen and individual perpetrators are to be held responsible.
The sub-committee, composed of Cuba, Panama, France, the United Kingdom and India, is scheduled to have the completed resolution ready for the legal committee by the end of this week.
The legal committee has already devoted one session to consideration of the resolution, which was introduced by Panama, India and Cuba to correct an omission in the Nuremberg decisions. All the delegates who spoke on the resolution approved its substance but several amendments were suggested.
Sir Hartley Shawcross of Britain, recalling that 6,000,000 Jews had been “coldly and deliberately exterminated” during the war, urged that international law should limit the power of states over their citizens and in certain cases, protect them against their own governments.
Shawcross emphasized that if nations went to war for humanitarian purposes, it was all the more necessary that international law should provide for humanitarian intervention in time of peace. He declared that dictators should be warned that they acted upon their own risk if they infringed on human rights.
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