10 Most Amazing And Inspiring Refugees In History

Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer who coined the word 'genocide' and did everything in his power to preempt and prevent atrocities of that kind. Lemkin was born in Belarussia to Polish parents. 

His father was a farmer but it was his mother, a painter and a philosophy student, who introduced to the heady ideas which would follow him into his later days; ideas of justice and equality and kindness that would drive his work with he United Nations Genocide convention. 

As he practised law in Poland he began to develop a concept of system mass torture and killing based on the experience of the Armenian minority under the Turkish Ottoman Empire as well as the fate of the Assyrians in Iraq in the 1930s.

After escaping Nazi occupied Poland Lemkin settled in the United States in the 1940s where he had a renewed commitment to preventing injustice and oppression around the world.

 He would go on to serve as a vital United States advisor for the prosecution and punishment of Nazi war crimes during the Nuremberg trials. Lemkin had lost over 40 members of his family to Nazi violence and this drove him to create methods of dealing with genocidal force in the international legal community. 

The prosecution of genocidal leaders since the second world war owes much to the work of this brave refugee lawyer.