President Obama refused to investigate Bush administration officials who bear responsibility for authorizing human rights abuses.
But Republican leaders last night were still discussing whether to include language authorizing a human rights commission in the trade bill.
It was replaced, we were told, with a Saudi text that merely authorized the UN's human rights office to provide technical assistance to an existing commission of inquiry being led by Yemen's Riyadh-based government in exile, and to monitor the situation on the ground and report to the Security Council.
On December 20 , 2017 President Trump issued an executive order implementing the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which authorized the imposition of sanctions against human rights abusers and those who facilitate government corruption.
Beginning in 1967, the commission was explicitly authorized to deal with violations of human rights, and shortly thereafter it set up elaborate mechanisms and procedures to investigate alleged human rights violations and otherwise monitor compliance by states with international human rights law.
"This report provides yet more damning detail of some of the human rights violations that were authorized by the highest authorities in the U.S.A. after 9/11," said Amnesty International's director for the Americas, Erika Guevara Rosas.
The Magnitsky Act was enacted by the Obama Administration, authorizing the U.S. Government to sanction human rights offenders.
In 2009, a Peruvian court found the ex-president guilty of corruption and human rights abuses, including authorizing extrajudicial killings by death squads.
And the United Nations should tell the generals that if they don't reform quickly it will authorize an inquiry into decades of massive human rights abuses by the military.
For each day that we continue our involvement in the Yemen conflict that Congress never authorized, we are complicit in the suffering and human rights abuses.
