Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. This is the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Viv Jones.

Genocide is widely understood to be the world's gravest crime.

The crime itself, the mass extermination of a people or a group, has an all too long history.

But before the 1950s, there was no international law against it, and no way of holding its perpetrators to account.

In fact, before the 1940s, it was an atrocity without even a name or a definition.

Today, the story of the man who coined the term genocide,

and fought for decades to create a law that could prevent it.

I can just see him in front of me slightly stooped.

He never sat down.

He never sat down.

He never smiled.

Same spread bear suit, which had seen better days in its life.

And he was grabbing delegates in between meetings, coloring them, and saying,

please vote for the Genocide Convention.

You will be saving lives.

My name is Lily A Loon. I'm 95 years old. In the years after the Second World War,

Lily A. Lelon was a young journalist working for an American newspaper.

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