WASHINGTON – More than 1,000 people from 85 countries who are accused of such crimes as rape, killings, torture and genocide are living in the United States, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.
America has become a haven for the world's war criminals because it lacks the laws needed to prosecute them, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said yesterday. There has been only one U.S. indictment of someone suspected of serious human-rights abuse. Durbin said torture was the only serious human-rights violation that was a crime under U.S. law when committed outside the United States by a non-American national.
“This is unacceptable. Our laws must change and our determination to end this shameful situation must become a priority,” Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on human rights and the law, said at a hearing of the subcommittee yesterday.
David Scheffer, a Northwestern University law professor who was the ambassador at large for war-crimes issues during the Clinton administration, testified that after the experience of war-crimes tribunals after World War II and international tribunals prosecuting many atrocities over the past 15 years, “one would be forgiven to assume that surely in the United States the law is now well established to enable U.S. courts – criminal and military – to investigate and prosecute the full range of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
“That, however, is not the case.”
