The Law of Genocide and Atrocities Committed Against the Herero and Nama Peoples

On 8 June 2021, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals confirmed the genocide conviction of General Ratko Mladić for the murder of thousands of Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica during the summer of 1995. The judgment also dismissed the Prosecution’s appeal of the Trial Chamber’s acquittal of Mladić on a genocide charge related to the 1992–95 ethnic cleansing campaign in six Bosnian municipalities. This judgment marked the ICTY’s final judicial interpretation of the Genocide Convention. It is a capstone on a rich interpretative corpus of law related to the crime of genocide and together with the important judgments and decisions of the ICTR and other international criminal tribunals forms a comprehensive jurisprudence of the 1948 Genocide Convention. On 28 May 2021, 11 days before the historic Mladić Appeal Judgment, Germany recognized that its crimes against the Herero and Nama peoples constituted genocide as defined by the Convention in 1948. The Herero/Nama Genocides, having their roots in German colonialism in southwest Africa, resulted in the estimated biological destruction of 80% of the Herero people and 60% of the Nama people between 1904 and 1908 in, what is now, Namibia and Botswana. This chapter surveys the current state of the law interpreting the Genocide Convention and in doing so, places it within the context of these first and lesser-known genocides of the twentieth century.