Their hopes buoyed by President Nixon’s message urging ratification of the long-pending Genocide Convention, supporters of the treaty will gather in Washington March 3 and 4 to open a campaign for prompt Senate action. Herschel Halbert, chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Human Rights and Genocide Treaties and Director of the International League for the Rights of Man, said, “We commend the President most heartily. The United States has deferred much too long its adherence to this treaty to which 75 other nations already are parties. For the first time in almost two decades,” he added “there is real reason to hope for Senate ratification.”
Among other encouraging indications he cited recent endorsements of ratification by Secretary of State Rogers and Attorney General Mitchell and a report of a section of the American Bar Association urging reversal of that influential body’s twenty-year opposition to the treaty. The genocide pact has never been brought to the Senate floor. President Nixon’s call for ratification is the first such Presidential initiative since the pact was originally submitted to the Senate by President Harry S. Truman in 1950.
Delegates representing the 47 national religious, labor, veterans, civic and other organizations that comprise the Ad Hoc Committee for the Human Rights and Genocide Treaties will come from all parts of the United States to attend the Washington meeting, Mr. Halbert said. “We intend to demonstrate to Senator Fulbright and to other members of the Foreign Relations Committee that there is firm and widespread public support for ratification of the treaty,” be declared.
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