Ad Hoc Committee on the Human Rights and Genocide Treaties.

The Ad Committee on the Human Rights and Genocide Treaties was organized in the spring of 1964 by some 35 national voluntary organizations for the purpose of encouraging the United States government to commit itself, through ratification of four United Nations conventions (dealing with Genocide, Slavery, Forced Labor and the Political Rights of Women), to the building and strengthening of a body of international law in the field of human rights. The first such measure, concerned with the basic, inviolable right to life itself, was the Genocide Convention. Developed in the highly charged atmosphere of the years immediately following the Holocaust, it was adopted unanimously by the UN General Assembly in 1948 and signed, but never ratified, by the United States. The Committees task was to overcome that resistance, through direct lobbying, publicity campaigns and outreach to sympathetic sectors of the U.S. population. Under the leadership of its Executive Secretary, Betty Kaye Taylor (a long-time staff member of the Jewish Labor Committee) the Committee mobilized support from labor, civil rights, civil liberties, religious and fraternal organizations, and won considerable support from Democratic and liberal republican senators. But Congressional opposition and public indifference proved intransigent. The campaign was to last much longer, and was strewn with more bitter disappointments, than the organizers of the Committee could have imagined; ratification was finally achieved in 1986. The collection includes administrative records, publicity materials, reports, clippings, articles, and extensive correspondence with prominent supporters of ratification.