criticism. Legal and political positions Overview An interview with Schabas in the journal Intellectum offers a concise overview of his opinions on Israeli operations in Gaza, the Goldstone Report, racism in Europe, the death penalty, genocide, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone, the International Criminal Court and its arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir of Sudan, and international criminal law in general. Death penalty Schabas has been very active in the movement for worldwide abolition of capital punishment. His book The Abolition of the Death Penalty in International Law and his other writings on the subject have been referred to in judgments by national and international tribunals, including the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the United States Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Canada and the Supreme Court of the Philippines. Schabas regularly lectures on capital punishment in China and the United States. In 2009 he was a consultant to the United Nations responsible for preparing the Secretary General's five-yearly report on the status of capital punishment. Schabas is the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the International Academic Network Against the Death Penalty and for a Universal Moratorium on Capital Punishment, and Advisor to the International Centre for Death Penalty Research at Beijing Normal University. Genocide For Schabas, the definition of what constituted the crime of genocide historically, unlike other laws governing international crimes, did not change for nearly 5 decades after its original formulation, though scholars beyond the legal discipline were critical of narrowness of the definition. Reviewing the evolving legal debate, Schabas notes a tendency to merge the notion of genocide with the related concept of crimes against humanity. In his own view, these should be kept distinct, with the former restricted to the definition originally framed in the Geneva Conventions, while the latter is sufficiently broad to prosecute all other cases of mass murder in ethnic and religious conflicts. Schabas argues that the legal term "genocide" is a loaded one that should not be used to describe every atrocity involving mass killings. He argues that, in the strict legal sense, the only true "genocides" in recent history were the Armenian genocide, the Jewish and Gypsy Holocaust, and the Rwandan genocide. In his book Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2009) he supports the view that Stalin's atrocities in the Ukraine, the killings of