The Genocide Convention created a crime that was well near impossible to prove before a court, which is why there were no convictions for genocide until 1998 and there have not been many afterward. The record of ICTY shows just how high the barrier has been set: they found that genocide was committed in Srebrenica, but did not find that it occurred anywhere else or that the VRS’s war aims (which explicitly included altering the population to suit their political goals) were genocidal. Pretty much every ICJ decision on genocide can be summarised as the judges saying “we don’t want to get a lot of genocide cases.”
Things started changing with Russia’s large scale targeting of civilian objects in Ukraine, and changed more with the forced removal of children from Ukraine to Russia. They changed even more when Israel started creating an artificially produced in Gaza. The distinction between war crimes and genocide is going to be breaking down in future court decisions.
And that is a good thing. The implicit hierarchy where one crime appears to be less meaningful than another has always been in the interest of abusers, and has never been in the interest of civilian victims.
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