Senate Body Remains Unmoved on Genocide Pact; Ignores Jewish Pleas

A subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today deferred for a year proposals to urge the Senate to ratify the United Nations Convention Against Genocide. This action was taken although the subcommittee heard massive testimony from spokesmen for major national Jewish organizations and local Jewish communal councils throughout the United States, as well as other witnesses, calling for early Senate action on the anti-genocide convention adopted by the United Nations in 1948. The Convention has been ratified by more than 50 countries, including the Soviet Union.

Sen. Thomas J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, chairman of the subcommittee, said it is “a great pity” that the Senate has not yet acted on the genocide issue. However, he pointed out that his group had not been given authority to tackle the issue by its parent body, the full Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Disappointment over the subcommittee’s inability to take the action on the issue of major interest to American Jewry was also expressed by Sen. Joseph S. Clark, of Pennsylvania, and Sen. William F. Proxmire, of Wisconsin, both Democrats.

Administrative sources revealed that the genocide issue was deferred due to opposition by conservatives in the Senate. State Department officials are also opposed to action on genocide, presumably fearing that the United States might, under the U.N. Convention, be charged with genocide in Vietnam. Advocates of ratification of the Genocide Convention were told it would be “easier” next year, after the Senate has ratified three other U.N. instruments on human rights, dealing with prohibition of slavery, outlawing forced labor, and giving political rights to women.

The Jewish spokesmen cited before the subcommittee America’s traditional concern for international human rights, and marshaled an array of arguments in support of the constitutionality of the Genocide Convention’s ratification. They stressed that continued U.S. failure to ratify all four of the U.N. human rights documents, including the one forbidding genocide, afford U.S. enemies the opportunity of charging the U.S.A. with hypocrisy regarding human rights. Today’s subcommittee hearing was the first held on the entire human rights issue by any Senate body since 1949.

MAJOR JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS TESTIFY; CITE U.S. TRADITIONS

Joining in the testimony were the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Jewish Labor Committee, Jewish War Veterans of the USA, National Council of Jewish Women, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, United Synagogue of America and Jewish community relations councils in 79 of the nation’s largest cities. All are affiliated in the National Community Relations Advisory Council, through which they coordinate their policies and planning in community relations matters.

Representing the entire group of Jewish organizations at the hearing were New York State Senator Harrison Jay Goldin, of the American Jewish Congress; Richard Maass, of the American Jewish Committee; Leon Schachter, of the Jewish Labor Committee; and Maurice Weinstein, of B’nai B’rith.

“Humanitarian interventions” by the United States in behalf of religious and ethnic minorities in other countries are traditional, the testimony of the Jewish organizations declared. It cited President Taft’s abrogation in 1911 of a trade treaty with Czarist Russia because of that country’s anti-Jewish discriminations; efforts by American Presidents — including Taft and Woodrow Wilson — to obtain assurances of minority rights in peace treaties following the Balkan Wars and World War I; and other interventions with the Ottoman Empire in 1840, Morocco in 1863, Rumania in 1872 and Poland in 1918-19.

The testimony recalled statements by Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in support of international human rights. As precedents for U.S. adherence to treaties in the human rights area, it recalled that a League of Nations Convention on Slavery had been ratified by the Hoover Administration, and an international treaty on the rights of women by the Roosevelt Administration.

The United States took initiative in pressing for adoption of the Genocide Convention in the United Nations, the Jewish spokesmen observed, adding that “tragically, the United States did not ratify the Convention.” Terming this an “abdication of leadership,” and a disservice to American international interests, the testimony recalled two attacks on the United States in U.N. debates, in the course of which Soviet representatives called U.S. representatives “hypocritical” because the U.S. “resolutely refuses to accept legal obligations” to U.N. treaties on human rights. “It would be a gross error to assume that the Soviet charges fell on deaf ears,” they observed.

Similar testimony urging “speedy” Senate ratification of the human rights conventions was voiced before the subcommittee by Richard N. Gardner, professor of law and international organization at Columbia University, who was formerly Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs.

He spoke on behalf of an ad hoc committee of national organizations representing 51 labor, religious, civic and nationality groups with a total membership estimated at tens of millions of Americans. The committee, formed three years ago, aims to the “strengthening of international law in the field of human rights.”