Summary Summary Genocide is an identity-based international crime. It is defined as an act or acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Perpetrators of genocide have long used identification documents to discriminate, dehumanize, and then carry out mass violence against protected groups. In its Framework for Analysis of Atrocity Crimes, the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention found that “increased politicization of identity” and discriminatory “measures or legislation” targeting protected groups serve as indicators in creating “an environment conducive to the commission of atrocity crimes.” Genocidal states often use legal and administrative tools to facilitate the destruction of a targeted group. This was the case during the Holocaust of the Jewish population and the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi population, and it is the case of the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya population in Myanmar. This report provides comparative case studies of these three genocides and the use of identification documents to carry out the international crime of genocide, and it provides new information on the Myanmar military junta’s ongoing targeting of Rohingya people in Rakhine State. Chapter I examines the instrumental role that identification documentation played in the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar. These case studies demonstrate how identification documents make it bureaucratically easier to identify, persecute, and kill targeted populations on a widespread, systematic, and massive scale. Genocide by attrition—which is the gradual destruction of a protected group by reducing their strength through sustained, indirect methods of destruction—must consequently be taken seriously as part of the effort to understand past genocides and to prevent future ones. 20 The National Verification Card (NVC)—a document that confers no rights and identifies Rohingya as “foreigners” in Myanmar. The card is light blue in color and states, in English and Burmese language, “Holding this identity card does not testify that ‘the card holder is Myanmar Citizen.’” ©Greg Constantine, 2018