The legal definition of genocide

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
(Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948)

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy , in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

  1. Killing members of the group;
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
This definition was included in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted in 1998 as article 6.