Published On: February 2nd 2026
Authored By: Aayesha Gupta
Kirit P. Mehta School of Law, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Deemed to be University (NMIMS), Mumbai
Introduction
The first thing genocide steals is not life.
It steals language.
Words become cautious. Numbers replace names. Legal phrases soften screams. What was once a home becomes “collateral damage.” What was once a child becomes a statistic. And what was once a crime becomes a “complex situation.”
International justice is supposed to restore meaning. Instead, too often, it preserves silence.
Gaza. Myanmar. Rwanda yesterday, Bosnia before that, Sudan after. Different geographies, different perpetrators, different victims, but an eerily identical aftermath: graves without verdicts, survivors without justice, and a global legal system that watches, records, and hesitates.
The world has never lacked laws against genocide. It has lacked the courage to enforce them. The Promise of “Never Again”
After the Holocaust, humanity made a promise that was supposed to be unbreakable. “Never again” was not meant to be poetry. It was meant to be law. The Genocide Convention did not ask states to feel sympathy. It demanded prevention, intervention, and punishment.
Genocide was defined as the crime of crimes because it was not merely about killing bodies, but about erasing a people’s future. Destroying language. Destroying memory. Destroying the idea that a group ever belonged to humanity at all.
And yet, decades later, genocide has not disappeared. It has simply learned to hide behind bureaucracy, geopolitics, and legal delay.
The promise of “never again” did not fail because the law was unclear. It failed because power learned how to outrun accountability.
Gaza: When Law Waits While People Die
In Gaza, the debate is not about suffering. That is visible. The debate is about naming.
Is it genocide, they ask, while bodies are still warm. Is intent proven, they say, while entire neighbourhoods vanish. Is the threshold met, they argue, while water, food, electricity, and medical care collapse simultaneously.
Gaza Ministry of Health (figures frequently cited by local authorities): ~67,000 killed and ~169,000 injured (figure reported in an independent analysis compiling Ministry numbers as of October 3, 2025). (1)
International law demands proof of intent. But intent is not always written in declarations. Sometimes it is visible in patterns. In repetition. In scale. In what is destroyed and what is deliberately withheld.
When hospitals are bombed, when journalists are killed in unprecedented numbers, when aid is blocked, when displacement becomes permanent, and when survival itself becomes conditional, the question is no longer whether law applies. The question is whether law dares to speak.
United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s situation reports (December 2025 snapshots) record tens of thousands of internally displaced persons in active displacement sites (Approximately 72,000 to 79,000 displaced people were recorded in UNRWA’s December 2025 situation reports on specific reporting dates). These numbers fluctuate rapidly with operations and population movements. (2)
International justice moves slowly by design. But genocide moves fast. Children do not get extensions. Corpses do not wait for jurisdictional clarity.
What haunts Gaza is not only death, but legal paralysis. Courts debate admissibility while families dig with bare hands. Statements are issued while names are erased.
Justice delayed is not neutral. It is a choice.
Myanmar: When Genocide Is Acknowledged Too Late
Myanmar offers a different horror. Here, genocide was not denied forever. It was simply recognized after the damage was already done.
The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic minority from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, a coastal region bordering Bangladesh. Despite living in the area for generations, they have long been portrayed by the Myanmar state as “foreigners” and denied citizenship under domestic law, rendering them stateless in their own homeland. On the other side are the ethnic Rakhine, a predominantly Buddhist community that also inhabits the same region and has historically faced its own economic marginalization. Tensions between the two communities, fuelled by decades of state propaganda, discriminatory policies, and militarization, were repeatedly exploited by Myanmar’s armed forces, transforming social fractures into systematic violence directed overwhelmingly at the Rohingya.
The Rohingya were stripped of citizenship, then dignity, then safety, and finally land. Villages burned. Women raped. Children drowned while fleeing. And still, the world hesitated.
By end-2023 UN reporting estimated millions internally displaced inside Myanmar (over 2.6 million IDPs in 2023 countrywide with more than 1.3 million newly displaced in 2023 alone according to consolidated UN reporting). This shows escalation beyond Rakhine into other regions after 2021. (3)
When legal action finally began, it was initiated not by Myanmar’s neighbours or powerful allies, but by The Gambia, a small West African state thousands of kilometres away, invoking the Genocide Convention with little strategic interest beyond moral obligation.
Myanmar teaches us a brutal lesson. Recognition without enforcement is symbolism, not justice. Court proceedings without consequences do not deter future crimes. They merely document past failures.
For survivors, justice that arrives years later feels less like accountability and more like an apology written too carefully to mean anything.
The Theatre of International Law
International justice today often resembles theatre. There are grand courtrooms, carefully worded indictments, and historic judgments. But behind the performance lies a devastating truth: international law is only as strong as the political will behind it.
Powerful states preach accountability while shielding allies. Vetoes replace verdicts. Strategic partnerships silence moral obligation.
Genocide does not survive because law is weak. It survives because law is selectively applied.
There is no shortage of evidence. There is a shortage of consequences.
The same legal system that can move swiftly to sanction financial crimes or prosecute individual warlords suddenly becomes fragile and procedural when state power is involved. Jurisdiction becomes complicated. Evidence becomes insufficient. Timing becomes inconvenient.
Justice becomes negotiable.
The Victim’s Absence in Legal Language
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of international justice is how rarely victims appear as humans within it.
Legal documents speak of “protected groups” but not bedtime stories interrupted by bombs. They mention “displacement” but not grandparents left behind because they could not walk. They refer to “excessive force” but not the sound of rubble crushing lungs.
This is not accidental. Law requires abstraction. But when abstraction becomes emotional distance, it risks becoming cruelty disguised as professionalism.
Victims do not need perfect legal definitions. They need acknowledgment that what happened to them mattered enough to stop it from happening again.
Instead, they watch conferences where their suffering is debated as though it were hypothetical.
Accountability Without Borders
Genocide is not only committed by those who pull triggers. It is enabled by those who supply weapons, provide political cover, block resolutions, and normalize destruction through silence.
International justice rarely touches these actors.
Arms manufacturers are rarely named. States that veto accountability are rarely shamed. Economic interests are rarely disrupted.
Justice focuses on individual perpetrators because they are easier to punish. But genocide is collective by nature. It requires systems, funding, legitimacy, and international tolerance.
Until accountability expands beyond the battlefield and into boardrooms, parliaments, and diplomatic chambers, genocide will remain a recurring event rather than an exceptional crime.
Beyond Gaza and Myanmar: The Pattern Repeats
What unites Gaza, Myanmar, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan is not just violence. It is the rhythm.
Early warnings are ignored. Dehumanization is dismissed as rhetoric. Violence escalates. International concern peaks briefly. Legal mechanisms activate slowly. Attention fades. Justice arrives partially, if at all.
This cycle is not tragic coincidence. It is institutional failure.
The world knows how genocide unfolds. It simply chooses not to interrupt it decisively.
International justice was designed after humanity’s worst crime. That it continues to fail at its primary purpose is not an accident. It is a reflection of priorities.
What Justice Should Mean
Justice is not only about punishment. It is about recognition, prevention, and moral clarity. It is about naming crimes while they are happening, not decades later in museums. It is about protecting victims more than reputations.
It is about understanding that neutrality in the face of mass destruction is not balance. It is complicity.
True international justice would not ask whether intervention is politically costly. It would ask whether inaction is morally survivable.
The Cost of Legal Silence
Every time genocide goes unpunished, the law loses credibility. Every time accountability is selective, future perpetrators learn a lesson.
Rwanda (1994): Estimated ~800,000 people killed in ~100 days (commonly cited UN/academic estimate). (4)
Srebrenica / Bosnia (1995): ~8,000 Bosniak men and boys killed – legally recognized as genocide by international tribunals. (5)
Darfur (early 2000s): Death toll estimates vary widely; authoritative reviews and government reports put estimates in the low hundreds of thousands (for example, many sources cite ~200,000-400,000 as the range used in analyses). (6)
They learn that outrage fades. That alliances protect. That time erases urgency.
Genocide does not require hatred alone. It requires confidence that consequences will not follow.
International justice, in its current form, too often provides that confidence.
Conclusion
The dead do not ask for perfect judgments. They ask not to be forgotten.
The survivors do not demand poetic statements. They demand protection, dignity, and acknowledgment.
And future generations will not ask whether international law was well written. They will ask whether it was brave enough to act.
Genocide is not a failure of humanity’s values. It is a test of them.
And so far, international justice has passed too few.
Until law chooses people over power, accountability over alliances, and urgency over caution, the promise of “never again” will remain what it has tragically become.
A sentence spoken too often.
And honoured too rarely.
