Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the context of "Genocide definitions"

The Istanbul pogrom, also known as the Istanbul riots, were a series of state-sponsored anti-Greek mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul's Greek minority on 6–7 September 1955. The pogrom was orchestrated by the governing Democrat Party in Turkey with the cooperation of various security organizations (Tactical Mobilisation Group, Counter-Guerrilla and National Security Service). The events were triggered by the bombing of the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece, – the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born in 1881. The bomb was actually planted by a Turkish usher at the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed. The Turkish press was silent about the arrest, and instead, it insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb.

The pogrom is occasionally described as a genocide against Greeks, since, per Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, despite its relatively low number of deaths, it "satisfies the criteria of article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) because the intent to destroy in whole or in part the Greek minority in Istanbul was demonstrably present, the pogrom having been orchestrated by the government of Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes" and "As a result of the pogrom, the Greek minority eventually emigrated from Turkey."

Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

The preamble to the CPPCG states that "genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world", and it also states that "at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity." Genocide is widely considered to be the epitome of human evil, and has been referred to as the "crime of crimes". The Political Instability Task Force estimated that 43 genocides occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in 50 million deaths. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence.

Jean Kambanda (born October 19, 1955) is a Hutu, Rwandan former politician who served as the Prime Minister of Rwanda in the caretaker government from the start of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. He is the only head of government to plead guilty to genocide, in the first group of such convictions since the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into effect in 1951.

Kambanda holds a degree in commercial engineering and began his career as a low-level United Popular BPR banker, rising as a technocrat to become the chair of the bank. At the time of the April 1994 crisis he was vice president of the Butare section of the opposition Republican Democratic Movement (MDR).