Cultural Genocide and its relation to Genocide from the perspective of Public international law -the Palestinian case as a case study رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

This study aimed to determine whether international criminal law adequately addresses campaigns that destroy a group’s cultural identity and, finding a critical gap, to outline how the Genocide Convention could be amended to criminalize such erasure explicitly. This study adopts a doctrinal comparative methodology with three in-depth case studies—Armenian deportations, Palestinian displacement, and Rohingya persecution—the Study traced a recurring pattern: before or alongside mass violence, perpetrators target languages, rituals, and heritage sites to sever intergenerational continuity. A review of treaties, jurisprudence, and institutional practice showed that heritage instruments protect monuments, while human-rights covenants safeguard cultural participation, yet neither regime attaches the individual criminal liability reserved for genocide. International and regional courts increasingly stretch existing doctrines to condemn cultural annihilation, but their rulings rely on interpretive creativity rather than clear statutory language, producing uneven protection. The study therefore proposes adding a sixth underlying act to Article II of the Genocide Convention that criminalizes the deliberate and systematic destruction of a protected group’s cultural, linguistic, or spiritual foundations. Such an amendment would harmonies fragmented norms, enhance early-warning frameworks, and enable courts to admit linguistic, anthropological, and digital evidence as primary proof of genocidal intent. In doing so, the law would finally reflect survivors lived reality: the murder of memory can be as devastating, and as deserving of justice, as the murder of bodies.