However, the denial of self-determination has not been limited to the colonial context. In particular, considering the limited recognition under international law of what might constitute a colonial context, it excluded countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa from the “nonself-governing territories” entitled to decolonization. Apartheid emerged as the clearest example of a practice that international law understood as constituting a denial of the right to self-determination. In the 1970s, the UN passed several resolutions condemning apartheid, namely the apartheid practice of Bantustans on the basis that it constituted a denial of the right to self-determination.33 Apartheid is now considered a crime against humanity,34 a grave breach of Protocol I to the Geneva Convention,35 and its prohibition is a peremptory norm of customary law.36 Apartheid consists in “similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa,” including acts that lead to isolation, fragmentation and segregation of a group.37 Apartheid works to deprive the deemed inferior racial group of their substantive rights, as well as their cohesiveness, and in this way undermine any capacity for the group to enjoy their right to selfdetermination. Other practices deployed to control and assimilate or erase a whole population in order to eliminate their right to self-determination include ethnic cleansing,38 33 See UNGA, Resolution 2775E (XXVI) (1971) and UNGA Resolution 3411D (XXX) (1975), cited in Richardson, supra 21, 195-196. 34 UNGA, International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid [Convention on Apartheid], 1015 UNTS 243, 30 November 1973, art.1, available at: https://treaties. un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%201015/volume-1015-i-14861-english.pdf; UNGA, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 2185 UNTS 3, 17 July 1998, art.7(j), available at: https:// www.icc-cpi.int/resource-library/documents/rs-eng.pdf. 35 International Committee of the Red Cross, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, 1125 UNTS 3, 8 June 1977, art.85, available at: https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/icrc_002_0321.pdf. 36 International Law Commission [ILC], Fourth Report on Peremptory Norms of General International Law (jus cogens) by Dire Tladi, Special Rapporteur, A/CN.4/727, 31 January 2019, §91-101, available at: http://legal.un.org/docs/?symbol=A/CN.4/727 [accessed 28 February 2020]. 37 Convention on Apartheid, supra 34, art.2. 38 It has been argued that ethnic cleansing through forced population transfers has served policies of erasure to the right of self-determination in twentieth-century Europe, with the purpose of ensuring ethnic homogeneity, including the minority exchanges after the Balkan Wars in 1912-1923, especially by the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations of 30 January 1923, but also the forced transfer of 15 million people between 1945 and 1950 in Central and Eastern Europe, 200 000 Cypriots following the 1974 Turkish invasion, and the displacement of 2,8 million people during the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. Stefan Wolff, ‘’The Use of Ethnic Cleansing in the ‘Resolution’ of Self-Determination Conflicts: Learning the Lessons from Twentieth Century Europe?,’’ Encyclopedia Princetoniensis, webpage, available at: https://pesd.princeton.edu/node/206 [accessed 28 February 2020]. 16