Incitement to genocide is a crime under international law which prohibits inciting (encouraging) the commission of genocide. An extreme form of hate speech, incitement to genocide is an inchoate offense and is theoretically subject to prosecution even if genocide does not occur, although charges have never been brought in an international court without mass violence having occurred. "Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" was forbidden by the Genocide Convention in 1948. Incitement to genocide is often cloaked in metaphor and euphemism and may take many forms beyond direct advocacy, including dehumanization and accusation in a mirror.
Definitions "Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" is forbidden by the Genocide Convention (1948), Article 3(c). If genocide were to be committed, then incitement could also be prosecuted as complicity in genocide, prohibited in Article 3(e), without the incitement necessarily being direct or public.
Incitement Incitement means encouraging someone else to commit a crime, in this case genocide. The Genocide Convention is generally interpreted as requiring "specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group".
"Direct" "Direct" means that the speech must be both intended and understood as a call to take action against the targeted group, which may be difficult to prove for prosecutors due to cultural and individual differences. Wilson notes that "direct" does not inherently exclude euphemisms (see below), "if the prosecution can show that the overwhelming majority of listeners understood a euphemistic form of speech as a direct (rather than circuitous, oblique or veiled) call to commit genocide". American genocide scholar Gregory Gordon, noting that most incitement does not take the form of imperative command to kill the target group (see below), recommends that a "glossary of incitement techniques should be woven into judicial pronouncements". The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia came to different conclusions on the prosecution of incitement. According to ICTR, incitement did not require an explicit call for violence against the targeted group or causally connected subsequent violence. ICTY came to the opposite conclusion in Prosecutor v. Kordić, because "hate speech not directly calling for violence... did not rise to the same level of gravity" as crimes against humanity.
"Public" Incitement is considered "public" "if it is communicated to a number of individuals in a public place or to members of a population at large by such means as the mass media". However, the Genocide Convention never defines the term "public" and it is unclear how the criterion would apply to new technologies, such as Internet-enabled social media. Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for speeches made at a roadblock, but on appeal it was ruled that these speeches were not considered public.
Causation Incitement to genocide is an inchoate crime as it is technically prosecutable even if genocide is never committed. However, Gordon writes that "no international court has ever brought an incitement prosecution in the absence of a subsequent genocide or other directly-related large-scale atrocity". Wilson noted that the judgement against Jean-Paul Akayesu "seemingly elevated causation to a legal requirement to prove incitement" as it stated "there must be proof of a possible causal link" between the alleged incitement and murders. Tribunals asserted that the incitement led to violence, even when this was not conclusively proven by the prosecution. Davies details four benefits of an inchoate and separate approach to prosecuting incitement, instead of prosecuting incitement as part of the crime of genocide:
obviating the difficult task of proving a causal connection between incitement and violence, allowing people to be charged with aiding and abetting incitement, allowing incitement to genocide to be prosecuted even when the resulting violence cannot be proven to have been genocidal (e.g. rather than war crimes or crimes against humanity), and enabling the prevention of genocide by prosecuting incitement thus acting as a deterrent to genocide.
Free speech issues Defining incitement to genocide is important because it can be in tension with the protection of freedom of expression. In the Léon Mugesera case, a Canadian federal appeals court found that his 1992 speech claiming that Hutus were about to be "exterminated by inyenzi or cockroaches" was protected free speech and that the speech's themes were "elections, courage and love". Subsequently, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that "reasonable grounds exist to believe that Mr. Mugesera committed a crime against humanity". Some dictators and authoritarian leaders have used overly broad interpretations of "incitement" or speech crimes in order to jail journalists and political opponents. Gordon argued that the benefits of free speech do not apply in situations where mass violence is occurring because "the 'marketplace of ideas' has been likely shut down or is not functioning properly." Therefore, it is justified to restrict speech that would not ordinarily be punishable. Susan Benesch, a free speech advocate, concedes that free speech provisions are intended to protect private speech while most or all genocide is state-sponsored. Therefore, in her opinion, prosecution of incitement to genocide should take into account the authority of the speaker and whether they are likely to persuade the audience. Richard Ashby Wilson observed that those prosecuted for incitement to genocide and related international crimes "have gone beyond mere insult, libel and slander to incite others to commit mass atrocities. Moreover, their utterances usually occur in a context of an armed conflict, genocide and a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population."
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