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. Despite President John F. Kennedy’s support for ratification of all four conventions, expressed in addresses to the U.S. Senate and the UN General Assembly in the summer and fall of 1963, Congressional resistance to ratification proved to be deeply entrenched. The Committee’s task was to overcome that resistance, through direct lobbying, publicity campaigns and outreach to sympathetic sectors of the U.S. population. The campaign was to last much longer, and was strewn with more bitter disappointments, than the organizers of the Committee could have imagined.

The organizations comprising the Ad Hoc Committee represented a wide range of civil liberties, religious, labor and fraternal groups, among them the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, the American Veterans Committee, B’nai B’rith, Hadassah, the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, the Jewish Labor Committee, the NAACP, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the United Church of Christ, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Workmen’s Circle, the Ukrainian National Association and several individual trade unions. Through the National Conference of Christians and Jews the Committee forged close ties with the social action wings of a number of Christian and Jewish denominations. The United Nations Association put the Committee in touch with liberal supporters of the UN nationwide, and by using its connections to the AFL-CIO and the Jewish Labor Committee the Committee garnered support throughout the labor movement.

...