[JURIST] During a Holocaust memorial service at the Park East Synagogue in New York City on Saturday, UN Deputy-Secretary-General Jan Eliasson [official profile] said preventing genocide requires making concerted efforts to figure out the forces that cause it. Eliasson emphasized attempting to improve understanding between communities of different faiths, as we live in a time when violent people impose their religious beliefs on others. In his speech, he stated [UN News report]:

The Holocaust did not start with Auschwitz… It started with bias, discrimination, looking down on people, the anti-Semitic slogans and laws that preceded Kristallnacht, and with rallies which provided both an identity and a cause, however perverted, for people who evidently needed both… We are grateful and humble, and we are inspired by your example of the resilience of the human spirit… disbelief and incomprehension” surround the Holocaust and genocides committed since, including those in Rwanda and Srebrenica. Every time we say ‘never again,’ we are in fact admitting failure to prevent.

Eliasson stressed the importance of vigilance as well, as this was a major component of the UN’s mission for preventing genocide. These goals were embodied in the Human Rights Up Front [UN summary] initiative, launched by Eliasson in 2013, which was based on responding quickly to early warning signs of human rights violations.

Genocide [JURIST news archive] continues to be a reality in various locations throughout the world. Earlier this month the UN published a report [JURIST report] stating the acts committed in the Central African Republic (CAR) constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity but not genocide. Also earlier this month the war crimes division of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina confirmed the indictment [JURIST report] of Dragomir Vasic on charges of genocide. In October a special tribunal in Bangladesh sentenced [JURIST report] Jamaat-e-Islami leader Motiur Rahman Nizami to death for crimes committed during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War with Pakistan. The former Cabinet minister was tried on charges that included genocide, rape, murder and torture, and was accused of personally carrying out or ordering the deaths of nearly 600 Bangladeshis while serving as supreme commander of the Al-Badr militia. Also in October the first trial judging charges of genocide against Cambodia’s 1970s Khmer Rouge regime opened [JURIST report] with the prosecutor saying it will show that Cambodians were enslaved in inhumane conditions that led to the deaths of 1.7 million people from starvation, disease and execution.