In September 1998 Jean-Paul Akayesu, a teacher from Taba in Rwanda, was found guilty in an international court of genocide and crimes against humanity. Although the word “genocide” had featured, in a descriptive sense, in the trial of major Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg in 1945-46, Akayesu was the first person ever explicitly convicted of the crime. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

While the word was coined only in 1944, genocide, defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”, is, of course, as old as history.