The Senate is expected to be bound morally, if not legally, to ratify the United Nations Convention against genocide when the new Congress, the 99th, convenes in January.
Just before adjourning last week, the Senate accepted by on 87-2 vote a resolution expressing the Senate’s support for the “principles” of the 35-year-old treaty and asserting that it “declaresits intention to act expeditiously” to ratify the Convention next year. Sens. John East (R.NC) and Steven Symms (R. ldaho) voted against the resolution.
Sen. Charles Percy (R. III.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said his committee would move expeditiously next year to get the resolution on the Senate floor again.
The resolution was suggested by Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R. Tenn.) when it became apparent during the debate last Wednesday that Sen. Jesse Helms (R. NC) and other opponents of ratification could prevent it by offering numerous amendments.
‘A SIGNIFICANT STEP FORWARD’
Sen. Christopher Dodd (D. Conn.), who agreed to the resolution in a conference with Baker and Helms, said that while he would have preferred immediate ratification, he realized it was not going to happen and saw the resolution as a “significant step forward.”
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was signed by President Truman on December 11, 1948. Although supported by every President since Truman, except Eisenhower, it has failed ratification in the Senate because of conservative opposition.
New life was given to the treaty this year on September 5 when President Reagan, who had been silent on the issue, announced his support of it on the eve of a speech to B’nai B’rith International.
Helms and others opposed to ratification want amendments to prevent the treaty from superseding the U.S. Constitution. In the debate Wednesday, Helms called the treaty just a “noble gesture.” But Dodd noted that symbols are useful in reflecting basic values and stressed that adoption of the Convention would “symbolize a commitment to the significance of human life, to a just world order and to the role of law.”
Sen. Rudy Boschwitz (R. Minn.), who led the floor fight for ratification, noted that “most of my family — were among the more than six million Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people.”
Several of the pro-ratification speakers paid tribute to the late Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-bom Jew who emigrated to the U.S. in 1941 and who was an adviser to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson when he was a prosecutor at the Nuremburg war crimes trials. Lemkin is credited with introducing the term genocide.
B’NAI B’RITH EXPRESSES DISAPPOINTMENT
B’nai B’rith International, meanwhile, has expressed disappointment over the Senate’s failure to ratify the genocide Convention before adjournment. Gerald Kraft, president of B’nai B’rith noted that ratification is “long overdue.”
He charged that “the Senate was using procedures to consider the treaty without really attempting to pass it” and “some Senators were hoping to load it with amendments that in reality would nullify the treaty.”
The B’nai B’rith leader observed that “baseless and emotional arguments” have blocked ratification for 36 years, playing “into the hands of America’s enemies and all foes of human values.”
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