by Nazi Germany that the legislative opposition to these practices became explicit. The Nuremberg Trials which followed the Second World War laid the legal foundations for what would go on to be enshrined within Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention: that population transfer and colonization of occupied territory is considered both a war crime and a crime against humanity. This position was to be further reinforced five decades later under The Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court (1998).2 Today, forced population transfer is considered one of the gravest breaches of international law. According to the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the former Commission on Human Rights: The essence of population transfer remains a systematic coercive and deliberate […] movement of population into or out of an area […] with the effect or purpose of altering the demographic composition of a territory, particularly when that ideology or policy asserts the dominance of a certain group over another.3 Therefore it includes strong elements of colonialism which is the “subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation.”4 Colonialism “constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights, is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations and is an impediment to the promotion of world peace and co-operation.”5 Based on European colonial history, “[s]ettlers sought to construct communities bounded by ties of ethnicity and faith in what they persistently defined as virgin or empty land,” and: [...] insofar as there was a logic to their approach to the indigenous populations, it was a logic of elimination and not exploitation: they wished less to govern indigenous people or to enlist them in their economic ventures than to seize their land and push them beyond an ever-expanding frontier of settlement.6 2 Articles 7 and 8, respectively. 3 A.S. Al-Khawasneh and R. Hatano, The Human Rights Dimensions of Population Transfer Including the Implantation of Settlers, Preliminary Report Prepared for Commission on Human Rights Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Forty-fifth Session (Bethlehem, Palestine, August 2, 1993), 27–32. 4 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, UNGA Resolution 1514 (XV),14 December 1960, para. 1. 5 Ibid. 6 Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen “Settler Colonialism: A concept and Its Uses” in Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century, Projects, Practices, Legacies, Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen (eds.), New York: Routledge, 2005, p.2. 6