Cultural genocide, the universal declaration, and minority rights

This essay will show how in the late 1940s the drafting of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights overlapped in a significant manner. That overlap helps explain why neither of these documents directly addresses the crime of cultural genocide. While they retained the original title, the drafters of the Genocide Convention severely weakened the prevention part of their goal when they cut out of their document the prohibition and punishability of acts of cultural genocide. Such a prohibition was part of the first draft of the Genocide Convention. During the drafting process, it was clear that the communist and Arab delegations favored a cultural genocide article for the Genocide Convention as well as a minority rights article for the Universal Declaration. However, the nations from both Americas were wedded to their respective policies of assimilation and, therefore, opposed both provisions.