Over at Main Justice, Andrew Ramonas reports that Barack Obama just signed into law the Human Rights Enforcement Act of 2009, which authorizes the creation of a human rights section within the criminal division of the Department of Justice.
According to the legislation, the new human rights section will prosecute "violations of Federal criminal laws relating to genocide, torture, war crimes, and the use or recruitment of child soldiers."
Just in case you're getting your hopes up, I doubt the human rights section will be involved when those violations are committed or enabled by agents of the government of the United States with the explicit sanction of the executive branch. It wouldn't have passed both houses of Congress so easily if that was the case.
Instead, it'll be focused on prosecuting people who have committed the crimes above elsewhere but who are now located within the United States.
Michael Macleod-Ball, acting director of the ACLU's Washington legislative office, said that while the new section was definitely "a good thing," its creation “left unchecked the box that deals with our own culpability with other kinds of human rights abuses over the past decade or so."
-- A. Serwer
