The Leahy Laws or Leahy amendments are U.S. human rights laws that prohibit the U.S. Department of State and Department of Defense from providing military assistance to foreign security force units that violate human rights with impunity. It is named after its principal sponsor, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont).
To implement this law, the U.S. embassies, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and the appropriate regional bureau of the U.S. Department of State vet potential recipients of security assistance. If a unit is found to have been credibly implicated in a serious abuse of human rights, assistance is denied until the host nation government takes effective steps to bring the responsible persons within the unit to justice. While the U.S. government does not publicly report on foreign armed forces units it has cut off from receiving assistance, press reports have indicated that security force and national defense force units in Australia, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Saint Lucia have been denied assistance due to the Leahy Law.
Origins and background
Senator Leahy first introduced this law in 1997 as part of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act. It initially referred only to counter-narcotics assistance for one year. The next year, with his leadership, Congress expanded it to cover all State Department funded assistance. This provision was included in all annual Foreign Operations budget laws until 2008. At that time Congress made the law permanent by amending it into the Foreign Assistance Act. In 2011, Congress revised the law substantially, seeking to enhance its implementation.
The United States government has long been a major, if not the largest, provider of assistance—including funding, training, non-lethal equipment, and weaponry—to foreign military and other security forces. In 2012 it spent $25 billion on training and equipping foreign militaries and law enforcement agencies of more than 100 countries around the world. Security assistance is driven by overriding U.S. national security objectives, including a desire to challenge/overturn communist regimes during the Cold War, counter drug trafficking in the 1990s, or counter anti-Western terrorism in the 2000s. Throughout the United States' long history of providing assistance to foreign armed forces, some portion of this assistance has been provided to forces that repress and abuse their own populations.
Before 1997, the primary U.S. legislation constraining aid to countries with poor human rights records was Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibited security assistance to "any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights." This law was seen as too vague to be effective in cases where the U.S. government had an overriding interest. According to Senator Leahy, his law "makes it clear that when credible evidence of human rights violations exists, U.S.aid must stop. But, it provides the necessary flexibility to allow the U.S. to advance its foreign policy objectives in these countries."
Text of the laws
U.S. assistance to foreign armed forces comes from two different budgets; therefore, two separate versions of the Leahy amendment have been enacted into law. One covers assistance to foreign forces funded through the State Department foreign assistance budget, and another covers assistance funded out of the Department of Defense budget.
The law covering State Department funded aid is found in Section 620M of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (as amended most recently in January 2014). It states:
The Department of Defense Appropriations version of the Leahy Law (10 U.S. Code § 2249e) reads:
There are several key differences between the two versions of the law. First, the Department of Defense version includes a waiver that allows the Secretary of Defense – after consulting with the Secretary of State – to waive the requirements of the provision if "extraordinary circumstances" warrant it.
Another difference concerns what steps a government must take to resume assistance once a security force unit has been flagged for gross human rights violations. The Foreign Assistance Act version requires that the government of the country in question "is taking effective steps to bring the responsible members of the security forces unit to justice" while the Defense Department version prohibits assistance "unless all necessary corrective steps have been taken".