The United States should “match its racial progress at home with a step to strengthen and enhance the rule of law on an international scale by ratification of the genocide convention,” a community relations worker told a B’nai B’rith youth convention this weekend.
Dr. William Korey, director of the New York bureau of the B’nai B’rith International Council, said that “at a time when racial barriers across the nation are slowly but steadily falling, it is a tragic corollary that American endorsement of this modern declaration of international freedom is still lacking.” He spoke before 400 delegates to the joint convention of Aleph Zadik Aleph and B’nai B’rith Girls.
He said that though 64 nations have already ratified the United Nations treaty against genocide, aimed at outlawing the kind of mass murder committed by the Nazis against European Jewish men, women and children, “in the 15 years since the convention was first proposed, it has been discussed, pigeon-holed and now apparently forgotten by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”
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