section_path: Crime/Development
section_name: Development
paragraph_text: Development
  
  According to the legal instrument used to prosecute defeated German leaders at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, atrocity crimes were only prosecutable by international justice if they were committed as part of an illegal war of aggression. The powers prosecuting the trial were unwilling to restrict a government's actions against its own citizens. In order to criminalize peacetime genocide, Lemkin brought his proposal to criminalize genocide to the newly established United Nations in 1946. He approached the African delegations first in an attempt to build a coalition of smaller states and former colonies that had themselves recently experienced genocide. Lemkin hoped that at this point the major powers—the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union—would step in and take credit for passing the convention.
  
  Opposition to the convention was greater than Lemkin expected due to various countries, and not just great powers, concerned that it would lead their own policies - including treatment of indigenous peoples, European colonialism, racial segregation in the United States, and Soviet nationalities policy - to be labeled genocide. Before the convention was passed, powerful countries (both Western powers and the Soviet Union) secured changes in an attempt to make the convention unenforceable and applicable to their geopolitical rivals ' actions but not their own. The result gutted Lemkin's original intentions; he privately considered it a failure. Over the course of these revisions, Lemkin's anti-colonial conception of genocide was transformed into one acceptable to colonial powers. Among the violence freed from the stigma of genocide included the same actions targeting political groups, which the Soviet Union is particularly blamed for blocking. Although Lemkin credited women's NGOs with securing the passage of the convention, the gendered violence of forced pregnancy, marriage, and divorce was left out. Additionally omitted was forced migration of populations —which had been recently carried out by the Soviet Union and its satellites, condoned by the Western Allies, against millions of Germans from central and Eastern Europe.