Senator Proxmire Gives One of 3,000 Speeches Urging Adoption of the Genocide Convention
It took the U.S. Senate four decades to ratify the United Nations Genocide Convention. Between 1967 and 1986, Senator William Proxmire (D–Wisconsin) gave over 3,000 speeches on the Senate floor urging ratification of the Convention. He delivered one of those speeches on this day.
Proxmire’s heroic effort is believed to be unprecedented in the history of the U.S. Congress.
The UN General Assembly had adopted the Convention on December 9, 1948, and the Senate finally ratified it on November 4, 1988.
One of the first petitions the UN received regarding genocide came from civil rights activists in the United States in a petition titled, “We Charge Genocide,” citing the lynching of African-Americans, which they submitted to the UN on December 17, 1951.
Read the UN Genocide Convention: http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html
Learn more about Senator Proxmire’s crusade against corruption and waste: William Proxmire, The Fleecing of America (1980)
Learn more: Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2002)
Watch a documentary on Senator Proxmire: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uHrn2B9k4s