The Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Genocide Convention concluded hearings yesterday on the UN treaty that would outlaw genocide. Subcommittee chairman Sen. Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, said he supported Senate ratification of the treaty because “I think it is chiefly important for its symbolic value.” The treaty has been in the Senate since June, 1949, when President Harry Truman asked for Senate ratification so that the United States could sign it. Since that time 75 nations have signed, including all the major UN powers. “We are conspicuous by our absence,” Church said.
Sen. John Sherman Cooper, Republican of Kentucky, pointed out that despite U.S. reluctance to sign, “our record is not bad. Our boys freed Buchenwald and Auschwitz.” Richard N. Gardner, representing the ad hoc committee on the Human Rights and Genocide Treaties, called the failure to ratify the treaty “a costly anachronism,” in that it weakened the law and the U.S. image in the eyes of the world. The treaty is not self-implementing. While it outlaws genocide, it provides no sanctions. Each country is required to set its own penalties within its own penal code for genocide as defined by the UN convention. Trial and punishment is left to the individual countries. Subcommittee members seemed to be most concerned about extradition under the treaty. They were worried that American citizens who committed genocide in other countries might be tried in those countries without due process of law and the guarantee of rights under the U.S. Constitution.
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