UN General Assembly
2014

was in part due to the First World War. Those systems fed on conflict, because ideological war and war against other peoples — against other men — were part of their identity. Those threats could have been resisted in time, but the democratic world failed, choosing a short- sighted policy of appeasement and the satisfaction of dictatorships’ appetites at the expense of weaker States. The price paid for that negligence was the Second World War, and the whole of humankind had to pay a price that would once have been unimaginable. It is from the horrible experience of that war, of the Holocaust, that the legal notion of genocide stems. Its originator and the author of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was a Polish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who understood the criminal nature of both kinds of totalitarianism even before the war. After the hecatombs of the war, the international community decided once again to build a system of collective security. I am glad that next year we will be