Diane Orentlicher [Special Counsel, Open Society Institute; professor, Washington College of Law, American University]: "The history of U.S. efforts to punish genocide is full of paradoxes. The United States led postwar efforts to prosecute Nazi crimes in Nuremberg and played the lead role in establishing international tribunals to prosecute those responsible for the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and perpetrators of atrocities, including the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, committed during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Yet it took 40 years for the United States to ratify the 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and, until last week, when the President signed into law the Genocide Accountability Act (GAA) of 2007, U.S. law provided an impoverished set of tools to hold to account those who commit crimes aimed at extinguishing a human group.

Until amended by the GAA, the law implementing U.S. obligations under the Genocide Convention, known as the Proxmire Act, allowed U.S. prosecutors to punish genocidaires only when they committed genocide in the United States—thankfully, an improbable scenario—or when the perpetrator was a U.S. national. Not surprisingly, this law has provided no occasions for enforcement since it was enacted almost two decades ago, and those who committed genocide abroad had little to fear if they sought sanctuary in the United States.

In recent years, Congress has acted to narrow the impunity gap left open by the Proxmire Act, principally by amending U.S. immigration laws. The United States can now deport, denaturalize or exclude genocidaires and can also prosecute them for customs fraud for lying about their background. Another law directs the Attorney General, when deciding on legal options relating to such aliens, to consider options for prosecution.

All too often, however, the Attorney General's options have been largely illusory. In countries that have recently emerged from genocidal violence, local courts are likely to be in shambles. In Rwanda, only 11 lawyers reportedly survived the 1994 genocide.

Until now, options for prosecuting genocidaires in the United States were largely limited to charges of visa fraud. Consider the case of Ratko Maslenjak, a member of an infamous Serb military unit connected to the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica who settled in the United States. When U.S. authorities discovered this, they brought charges against Maslenjak—not for genocide, but for lying about his service in the Srebrenica unit when he applied for his green card.

In 2007, Congress transcended partisan divisions to close the gap in U.S. law highlighted by this case, enacting the GAA unanimously in both Houses. The new law allows U.S. prosecutors to bring genocide charges against individuals, regardless of their nationality, who are believed to have committed genocide abroad and are in the United States. On December 21, 2007, President Bush quietly signed the act into law (the presidential statement announcing this historic act listed it, without comment, along with twelve other laws signed that day). Now, almost 60 years after it signed the Genocide Convention, the United States has given its prosecutors a powerful weapon against the impunity that emboldens genocidaires. The challenge now is to ensure the law is used when the next Maslenjak is found here."