“Intent to Destroy”: Reflections on the Swedish Yazidi Genocide Case

Studying the Swedish judgments within the Lina Ishaq case is an unsettling expertise. The outline of the atrocities inflicted on the Yazidi neighborhood by ISIS is offered with a stage of factual precision that leaves little house for abstraction. The Stockholm District Courtroom’s account of the assaults on Sinjar and the following therapy of Yazidi males, ladies, and kids (pp. 68–77) is harrowing: households torn aside, ladies and ladies subjected to systematic rape and slavery, youngsters disadvantaged of language, faith, and id. It’s a stark reminder that behind the doctrinal debates to which we commit a lot mental vitality lie human beings whose lives have been shattered. I felt virtually uncomfortable turning from this insufferable factual reconstruction to the extra technical challenge I want to deal with right here. And but, it’s via these authorized particulars that the legislation tries to call what occurred, and to border violence in phrases that enable us to know its gravity. 

The case considerations a Swedish lady who lived in Raqqa and was convicted of genocide, crimes in opposition to humanity, and warfare crimes. For current functions, what pursuits me most is the genocide conviction referring to the forcible switch of Yazidi youngsters to ISIS households. Each the District Courtroom (judgment of 11 February 2025) and the Svea Courtroom of Enchantment (judgment of 11 November 2025) discovered that the accused hosted Yazidi ladies and boys in her residence, managed them, prevented them from practising their Yazidi faith, compelled a few of them to carry out Islamic prayers, and ready them for switch to different ISIS members as slaves (the Courtroom of Enchantment judgment will not be but publicly out there on-line; I obtained the Swedish model by requesting it from the court docket’s archives and from the Prosecutor). The Courtroom of Enchantment describes these circumstances clearly, particularly at pp. 14–17 and 20–21, the place it confirms that Yazidi youngsters have been intentionally stripped of the cultural markers of their group and built-in—below coercion—into the neighborhood aligned with ISIS.  

That such a severe conviction is grounded in practices that don’t contain killing however reasonably the dismantling of a bunch’s id raises an essential query: what does the Genocide Conference imply when it requires an “intent to destroy” the group? 

This isn’t a brand new query, nevertheless it stays one of the crucial contested parts of the crime. The orthodox view, dominant within the case legislation of the Worldwide Legal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Worldwide Legal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), is that the intent to destroy should at all times discuss with the bodily or organic destruction of the group (specifically, ICTY, Krstić, Appeals Judgment, 2004, paras. 25–26 and ICTR, Akayesu, Trial Judgment, 1998, paras. 498–499; for an summary of the case-law, Larissa van den Herik). This view is broadly repeated within the literature, by reference amongst others to the preparatory works of the Genocide Conference (see amongst others W.A. Schabas, pp. 234–236). This studying has been used to elucidate why assimilationist insurance policies, such because the Canadian Indian residential faculty system, don’t fall below the Conference (though ultimately, Canada’s Home of Commons unanimously acknowledged the System as genocide); why many types of ethnic cleaning—no matter their brutality—should not handled as genocide; and why large-scale hurt to civilians throughout wartime is commonly attributed to navy goals reasonably than to genocidal intent. The physical-biological studying operates as a doctrinal constraint, a form of “containment mechanism”, stopping the overextension of the genocide label. However it additionally has the impact of rendering legally invisible sure types of destruction that don’t contain the fast or deliberate killing of the group’s members. 

The issue turns into apparent in relation to Article II(e) of the Genocide Conference, which criminalises the forcible switch of kids from one group to a different. The switch of kids doesn’t, in itself, bodily destroy anybody. How, then, can this act be dedicated with an “intent to destroy the group”? What’s the nature of the destruction at stake? 

That is exactly the issue poignantly addressed by Choose Mohamed Shahabuddeen in his partially dissenting opinion within the Krstić attraction earlier than the ICTY. His evaluation, spanning paragraphs 45 to 54 of the opinion, is without doubt one of the most considerate makes an attempt to grapple with the conceptual limits of the physical-biological paradigm. Shahabuddeen begins from the statement that, whereas the acts listed in Article 4(2) of the ICTY Statute (reproducing verbatim Article II of the Genocide Conference) are undeniably bodily or organic in kind, the Conference doesn’t essentially require that the corresponding intent to destroy goal the group’s bodily or organic existence. At paragraph 48, he attracts an important distinction: the bodily nature of the act doesn’t predetermine the character of the meant destruction. The definition of genocide specifies that some acts should intention at bodily or organic destruction, comparable to imposing circumstances of life calculated to result in such destruction or measures meant to stop births. However the absence of such qualifiers in different provisions, together with killings and the switch of kids, means that the drafters didn’t intend to restrict “destruction” to a bodily dimension throughout the board. 

He then reaches what I imagine is the conceptual centre of his argument. At paragraph 50, Shahabuddeen observes {that a} protected group will not be a organic organism however a social unit, held collectively by “traits—typically intangible—binding collectively a set of individuals as a social unit”. If these traits are deliberately dismantled via one of many listed acts, it’s synthetic to assert that such destruction will not be genocide merely as a result of the group’s members stay bodily alive. The Conference protects the existence of the group as a social formation, and its destruction can subsequently consist within the annihilation of the group’s capability to operate as such, even when bodily lives are spared. 

Shahabuddeen is cautious to dispel any confusion with the notion of “cultural genocide”. At paragraph 53, he makes it clear that the destruction of tradition alone will not be genocide. However he additionally insists that the destruction of cultural or social buildings could function proof of an intent to destroy the group as such, supplied this intent is linked to one of many enumerated acts. His remaining conclusion at paragraph 54 is each measured and decisive: the intent to destroy a bunch “is able to being proved by proof of an intent to trigger the non-physical destruction of the group”, so long as a listed act is used to implement that intent. 

This interpretive strategy can be mirrored within the place taken by plenty of students, comparable to Elisa Novic and Kurt Mundorff, who argue that the intent to destroy could embody types of socio-cultural annihilation, and isn’t essentially confined to bodily or organic destruction. An identical understanding has sometimes surfaced in nationwide case legislation, most notably in Germany. In Jorgić (12 December 2000), the Federal Constitutional Courtroom upheld the interpretation adopted by the courts of first and second occasion, specifically that the intent to destroy refers back to the destruction of the group as such, and never solely to its bodily or organic elimination. The European Courtroom of Human Rights, when later reviewing the identical case, discovered this interpretation of the time period destroy not unreasonable (para. 105). What underpins this line of reasoning is a conceptual distinction between the bodily character of the underlying acts and the character of the destruction that the perpetrator finally seeks to realize. It acknowledges that genocidal initiatives could unfold not solely via killing, but in addition via the systematic dismantling of a bunch’s id, household buildings, and cultural continuity. It’s exactly this type of destruction that the Swedish courts additionally recognized within the Yazidi case. 

The District Courtroom had already noticed that ISIS’s therapy of Yazidis concerned each their bodily elimination and their social eradication. The Courtroom of Enchantment (pp. 7–8) confirmed this studying, noting that the assault on the Yazidi non secular group shaped a part of a scientific effort to remove the group “in entire or partly”. Extra importantly for current functions, the Courtroom of Enchantment emphasised that ISIS sought to destroy the Yazidis as a bunch, not solely via killings and enslavement, but in addition via their absorption into ISIS households, the pressured abandonment of Yazidi religion and language, and the reconfiguration of kids’s identities (pp. 14–17; 20–21). The switch of Yazidi youngsters into ISIS households was not an incidental by-product of ISIS’s navy operations; it was a deliberate technique geared toward extinguishing the group’s capacity to breed itself socially and culturally. 

Seen on this gentle, the Swedish judgment makes excellent sense. It recognises that genocide could be dedicated even the place no killing happens, supplied that the act falls inside the enumerated acts and the intention is to destroy the group as a social formation. Removed from increasing the Conference, this interpretation is devoted to its construction: Article II(e)—in regards to the act of forcibly transferring youngsters from a bunch to a different group—exists exactly to seize the destruction of a bunch via the absorption of its youngsters into one other id. What the Swedish courts have performed is to offer full impact to this provision, in a factual context during which the destruction of the group was pursued each bodily and socially. 

The Lina Ishaq case subsequently illustrates how nationwide courts, making use of their very own genocide laws, can contribute to a extra nuanced and correct understanding of what “intent to destroy” may imply in observe. It resonates deeply with Shahabuddeen’s perception {that a} group exists via its social bonds, and that its destruction can happen via the systematic dismantling of these bonds. Within the Yazidi case, genocide was not solely within the mass killings and enslavement; it was additionally within the pressured conversion, the suppression of Yazidi language and faith, the dissolution of household buildings, and the absorption of kids into ISIS households. It is a type of destruction that leaves our bodies alive however destroys the group all the identical. 

And maybe that is probably the most painful lesson of the Swedish case: genocide could be dedicated with out bloodshed, via the deliberate erasure of id and the destruction of the social cloth that enables a bunch to exist. The legislation, if interpreted with readability and braveness, is able to recognising that. 

Translation of the Swedish Appeals Courtroom judgments into English was produced with the assistance of ChatGPT.