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Standing Agenda

The Committee on Conscience mandate is to alert the national conscience, influence policy makers, and stimulate worldwide action to confront and work to halt acts of genocide or related crimes against humanity. In carrying out its mandate, the Committee uses a wide range of actions, including public programs and activities, temporary exhibitions and public or private communications with policy makers. It seeks to work whenever possible with other governmental and non-governmental organizations.

According to the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was signed by United States in 1988, genocide is defined by as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Crimes against humanity include a wide range of acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.

The Committee on Conscience maintains a "standing agenda" of situations and issues within its mandate. In order to allow the Committee to take up situations and focus attention on them in a timely manner, the agenda uses graduated categories of urgency:

1. EMERGENCY: Acts of genocide or related crimes against humanity are occurring or immediately threatened.
2. WARNING: Organized violence is underway that threatens to become genocide or related crimes against humanity.
3. WATCH: The circumstances indicate a serious potential for the eruption of mass violence that would be within the Committee’s mandate.

Places currently on the standing agenda are:

1. Chechnya, Russia
2. Democratic Republic of the Congo
3. Sudan

We also continue to monitor developments in Rwanda related to the 1994 genocide, Bosnia-Herzegovina related to the 1992-1995 war, and in Burundi related to the 1993-2000 civil war.