NEW YORK — The United Nations General Assembly convened for a crucial plenary session to address the international responsibility to prevent genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. However, as Priyanka Shankar highlights in an Al Jazeera article published on July 6, 2026, this meeting takes place under the heavy shadow of ongoing humanitarian crises worldwide—leaving critics deeply skeptical about whether any new protocols will truly protect victims on the ground.

The report underscores a bitter reality: while the UN codified genocide as an independent crime back in 1948, the international body has repeatedly failed to act when global political interests intervened. Al Jazeera details six historical and ongoing catastrophes where the UN fundamentally failed to prevent mass atrocities:

• The Rwandan Genocide (1994): The slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus where the UN, under pressure from the US, actively avoided using the word "genocide" and delayed intervention.

• Israel's Genocide in Gaza (2023–Present): With over 73,000 Palestinians killed, multiple UN independent inquiries have formally concluded that Israel’s actions constitute genocide. Yet, the UN remains paralyzed due to continuous US vetoes in the Security Council and ongoing Western arms sales.

• The Srebrenica Genocide (1995): The massacre of over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys inside a UN-declared "safe zone." Official UN recognition was stalled for decades, notably by a Russian veto in 2015.

• Genocide in Sudan (2023–Present): The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have unleashed atrocities in Darfur that bear the "hallmarks of genocide," yet a lack of global political will leaves the international community watching from the sidelines.

• The Myanmar Rohingya Genocide (2017–Present): A brutal military campaign that forced 750,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh, with further UN diplomatic actions blocked by Chinese and Russian vetoes.

China’s genocide against the Uighur people

The Uighurs are an ethnic minority group mostly living in the Xinjiang autonomous region (East Turkistan) of the People’s Republic of China. They are predominantly Muslims.

According to official Chinese records, there are 12 million Uighurs, representing almost half the population in Xinjiang. The World Uyghur Congress, a group of Uighur exiles advocating for human rights in their homeland, puts their number at about 20 million living inside and outside of China.

In the late summer of 2018, the United Nations revealed that at least one million Uighurs had been detained in “counter-extremism centres” in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, thrusting the treatment of a once-obscure mostly Muslim ethnic group into the spotlight. The report also revealed that a further two million Uighurs had been “forced into so-called re-education camps for political and cultural indoctrination” since mid-2017.

The detentions, as well as forcible training and alleged abuses inside enclosed government facilities, were later described by the US and many international human rights groups as a form of genocide constituting “crimes against humanity”.

In September 2022, the UN Human Rights Office said in a long-delayed report that China’s detention of Uighurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang may amount to “crimes against humanity”.

The government of the US as well as parliaments in the United Kingdom, Canada and France have since labelled China’s treatment of the Uighurs as “genocide”.

China has, however, rejected the allegations, saying its policies towards the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities living in its far western region are necessary to “fight extremism” and to promote upward economic mobility for the impoverished ethnic groups. Beijing is also a permanent member of the UN Security Council, making it challenging for the world body to prevent the genocide in Xinjiang.