Section 1 [10.581 Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month] designates April as Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month, beginning in 2013. This section describes that after the holocaust, on December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 260(III)A, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, declaring genocide a crime under international law, and defining genocide to include the commission of certain acts, including killing members of a group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group's physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group, and forcibly transferring children of a group to another group, with the intend to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
This section declares that to prevent future genocides and mass atrocities, effective prevention measures must be implemented before a crisis has erupted, and that educating the public can help to protect individual rights and promote a culture of lawfulness that will help prevent future genocides. This section permits the governor to take any action necessary to promote and encourage the observance of Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month.
This section is effective the day following final enactment.
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