Quote:
Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide 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.
– Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2
The point most likely to be considered here would probably be
Quote:
"the concept of genocide applies only when there is an actualized intent, however successfully carried out, to physically destroy an entire group (as such a group is defined by the perpetrators)" (The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, Vol. 1, 1994).
Quote:
According to Cecil Woodham-Smith, the British government did not have a
plan to destroy the Irish people. Woodham-Smith holds that the misfortunes
occurred because Lord John Russell's government failed to foresee the
consequences of its actions. Although I am indebted to Woodham-Smith for
my knowledge of the famine, it is my opinion that a government is as
responsible for a genocidal policy when its officials accept mass death as
a necessary cost of implementing their policies as when they pursue
genocide as an end in itself. (14)
Quote:
Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, with experience arguing on matters of genocide before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, wrote to the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education on May 2, 1996, saying, in part:
Clearly, during the years 1845 to 1850, the British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, and racial group commonly known as the Irish People.
Professor Boyle's legal opinion concludes that Britain's actions violated sections (a), (b), and (c) of Article II, and therefore constituted acts of genocide against the Irish People.
On April 26th, 1849, one hundred years before the Genocide Convention was signed, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Clarendon, wrote to the Prime Minister, John Russell, expressing his feelings about the lack of aid from Parliament:
I do not think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination.
