Speech at the First Meeting of the International Coalition of Countries for the Return of Ukrainian Children, Sponsored by the Office of the Ukrainian Ombudsman, December 8, 2023 in Kyiv, Ukraine

Elisa von Joeden-Forgey Executive Director, Lemkin institute for Genocide Prevention Evjf@lemkininstitute.com Speech at the First Meeting of the International Coalition of Countries for the Return of Ukrainian Children, Sponsored by the Office of the Ukrainian Ombudsman, December 8, 2023 in Kyiv, Ukraine I would like to thank the Office of the Ombudsman of Ukraine for the invitation to speak at th. [...] This is one of the reasons that the transfer of children is recognized as an act of genocide in section II.e of the Genocide Convention and is also understood in scholarship as a core feature of genocidal processes. [...] We have seen children transferred to the perpetrator group in many cases of past genocide, including in the settler colonial genocides in North America and Australia, the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1923, the so-called Dirty War in Argentina, and the ISIS genocide against the Yazidi and Christian communities of Iraq and Syria. [...] The transfer of children was also an integral part of the Nazi’s genocidal domination of Eastern Europe in the form of the Lebensborn project. [...] By transferring children, perpetrators simultaneously appropriate the biological resources of the target group, enriching their own group in the process, and destroy the identity of the target group through the immeasurable harm caused by the separation of families an the destruction of communities.