Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today I rise in strong support of the motion of my friend the member for Goldstein to acknowledge the 70th anniversary of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This was a significant moment for the world, where it was unanimously agreed that the horrors inflicted on people on the basis of their race, national or ethnical origin, or religious grouping would become a crime of international law.

Seventy years ago the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was approved by General Assembly resolution 260A(III) on 9 December 1948. Australia's then foreign minister, Dr HV Evatt, was in the chair of the General Assembly when the conventions were passed, and Australia was one of the first countries to adopt the convention.

The convention made genocide a crime under international law so that it should be both prevented and punished. The convention defines genocide in article II as:

… any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article III made the following acts punishable:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

(d) Attempt to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide.

The year 1948 was within three years of the end of the Second World War, a war which saw the Holocaust, the Shoah, in which the murder of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazi regime and its collaborators took place. This figure represented nearly two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. In April 1945, General Dwight D Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe, wrote about Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald he'd just visited. Eisenhower must have been an amazing leader and a man of extraordinary foresight. He said:

The things I saw beggar description … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering … I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations to 'propaganda'.

Eisenhower organised delegations of politicians, journalists and filmmakers to view firsthand what had happened in the death camps in order to bear witness to what was then—and it's hard to imagine now—a sceptical public. One journalist was asked by a colleague if the scenes in the camps were as bad as they were described in the newspapers. 'No,' he responded, 'they were worse.'

Sadly, in the 70 years since the Holocaust, the denial of it has been growing around the world, especially in the Muslim world. Even in the West, younger generations are more ignorant of the Holocaust than they should be. As a member of this House, I've been outspoken on the importance of both the recognition and the prevention of genocide and of upholding human dignity as a fundamental human right. I've spoken out against the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, of Yazidis and Kurdish minorities, as well as drawing the House's attention to human rights abuses in North Korea, including the murder of mixed race children.

On this, the 70th anniversary, we are reminded of the importance of recognition in an act of prevention and prosecution. Let me say in this House that I think the world has been too slow to recognise and call out the Armenian genocide a century ago for what it was. It's time every nation in the world, including our own, recognised the Armenian genocide for what it was. It's time the Erdogan regime in Turkey owned up to their own history as well. Unlike my friend the member for Goldstein, I'm not of Armenian heritage, nor do I have a large Armenian constituency in my electorate. But the cause of the Armenian people on this point is absolutely just. The death of 1½ million Armenians has been dismissively referred to as 'victims of war', 'civilian casualties' or 'collateral damage'. Those very euphemisms were the same used by Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust. Who could forget Hitler's infamous line, 'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?' That's why it's important to call these genocides out for what they are.

My friend the member for Goldstein spoke about Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and the former Yugoslavia. I, like him, think of the Kurds, both the Kurds who have been subjected to genocide during the Iran-Iraq war and in subsequent times as well, where we continue to see their murder. If 'never again' is to be anything more than a slogan, it must be a call to action. That call to action must be a call for recognition and to stop denial, a call for more education, a call for greater acknowledgement of the genocides that have occurred. If we don't do that, we're failing to learn from history and, in effect, desecrating the memory of those who did not live to see the future.

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