California Assembly Bill ACR144 Amended / Bill

 BILL NUMBER: ACR 144AMENDED BILL TEXT AMENDED IN ASSEMBLY APRIL 8, 2010 AMENDED IN ASSEMBLY MARCH 22, 2010 INTRODUCED BY Assembly Member Blumenfield (Coauthors: Assembly Members Anderson, Feuer, and Ruskin) MARCH 10, 2010 Relative to Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST ACR 144, as amended, Blumenfield. Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. This measure would proclaim the month of April of each year as Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. Fiscal committee: no. WHEREAS, During the Second World War, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, motivated by the attempted extermination of the Armenian and Assyrian communities during the First World War, coined the term "genocide" to describe a coordinated plan of actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating a group itself, for example, by disintegrating a group's political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion, and economic existence, and destroying the personal security, liberty, health, and dignity, and the lives of individuals belonging to the group; and WHEREAS, Following the Holocaust, on December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 260 (III) A, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, declaring genocide to be a crime under international law, and defining genocide to include the commission of certain acts, including killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group's physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group; and  WHEREAS, Existing laws recognize certain genocides, including the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, and various other genocides have been conducted throughout history, including those in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and in other parts of the world; and   WHEREAS, Many genocidal acts throughout history have occurred during the month of April. In April 1915, the Turkish government began rounding up leading Armenian religious, political, and intellectual leaders in the capital of Istanbul and murdering them. This pattern was copied across the country, leading to the deaths of more than one million Armenians with the relocation of survivors to the Syrian desert. In April 1933, the Nazis issued a decree preparing the way for the "Final Solution," in which they defined non-Aryans as "anyone descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents. One parent or grandparent classifies the descendant as non-Aryan ... especially if one parent or grandparent was of the Jewish faith." In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, and initiated massacres that emptied entire cities into "killing fields," leading to the death of some two million people. In April 1992, the siege of Sarajevo began, leading to the deaths of more than 2,000 Bosnian Serbs. In April 2004, the Rwandan President's airplane was shot down, leading to the killing of moderate leaders by Hutu hardliners, and in the next three months 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered. In April 2003, the displacement of Darfurians began in Sudan, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and the displacement of millions; and  WHEREAS, In 2008, the Prevention of Genocide Task Force, convened by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the United States Institute of Peace, issued a report finding that in order to prevent future genocides and mass atrocities, effective prevention measures must be implemented before a crisis has erupted, and that educating the public can help to protect individual rights and promote a culture of lawfulness that will help prevent future genocides; and WHEREAS, The State of California condemns, and desires to combat, all acts of genocide; and WHEREAS, Educating the public about the evils of genocide and commemorating victims of genocide, including the adoption of a Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month, are effective tools that will further these goals; now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Assembly of the State of California, the Senate thereof concurring, That the Legislature hereby proclaims the month of April of each year as Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month; and be it further Resolved, That the Chief Clerk of the Assembly transmit copies of this resolution to the author for appropriate distribution.