LEAHY LAW: HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE LAW ROILING U.S.-ISRAEL TIES
Leahy Law: Here's What You Need to Know About the Law Roiling U.S.-Israel Ties
While sometimes misunderstood as a measure that blocks U.S. military aid to foreign militaries implicated in gross human rights violations, the Leahy Law allows for 'remediation' if the government has taken all corrective steps to bring to justice those responsible for the violations
April 27th, 00AM April 27th, 02AMWASHINGTON – The looming U.S. decision on whether to block military aid to an Israel Defense Forces unit over gross human rights violations would potentially mark a landmark moment in the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
The significance of the measure has added unprecedented attention to the "Leahy Law" — a 27-year-old congressional measure introduced by legendary Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy that has been frequently invoked by human rights advocates to better hold Israel accountable as a U.S. ally.
Along with the attention, however, has come misinformation and misunderstandings about the law, its consequences on U.S. allies and foreign assistance, as well as the long-term efficacy of such measures.
In order to understand the Leahy Law and its implications on U.S.-Israel relations, one must go back to the source of the original legislation and its implementation over the past several decades.
Leahy, the longtime Vermont senator, introduced the law as a tool to block U.S. military aid and training to specific units suspected of "gross human rights violations" including but not limited to extrajudicial killings, rape and sexual violence, enforced disappearance and torture. These examples, however, are not specifically defined and simply represent the most extreme examples.
The legislation represented a different form of accountability toward recipients of U.S. aid. Rather than serving as a law to address widespread systematic abuses by foreign militaries receiving U.S. assistance — for which laws already existed — the law was tailored toward the lowest organizational levels of specific militaries.
"It's to be targeted and specific, and not to interfere with the overall U.S. military assistance to a foreign ally. People misinterpret the law as being about all the aid going to a foreign country," says Adam Shapiro, who was up until recently Director of Advocacy for Israel-Palestine at Democracy for the Arab World Now – DAWN. "It's meant to be a very sharp tool."
The Leahy Law, however, also includes terminology allowing for foreign militaries implicated in such violations to have "remediation" if the government has taken all corrective steps to bring to justice those responsible for the violations.
The law, however, doesn't specifically define what "justice" entails — whether that serve as a trial or imprisonment or someone losing their job or any other form of punitive action.
"It's very open-ended in a lot of ways, even though it's very specific," Shapiro says. "It's almost like a 'bad apples' approach — let's find the bad ones and deal with them, and if you take them out, then the rest is fine."
Despite the big step forward toward human rights accountability represented by the Leahy Law, however, it failed to put in place any sort of transparency and reporting toward its application.
"The public doesn't actually know, and it's when a unit is listed or vetted for running afoul of the Leahy Law is not even something that can necessarily be FOIA'd," Shapiro says, referring to the Freedom of Information Act that requires disclosure of previously unreleased or uncirculated information controlled by the U.S. government upon request.
Past examples, however, have publicly emerged — including of U.S. allies and recipients of U.S. military assistance.
One of the first known targets was a Colombian military unit accused of intentionally killing thousands of civilians, in part to earn bonuses being offered for killing militants. Units in security forces in Mexico, the Philippines, St. Lucia, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan have similarly been reportedly implicated.
U.S. administrations notably have the option of discretely notifying Congress in classified settings to avoid causing any diplomatic headaches with allies.
One particularly notable example of this is the case of Australia — a significant U.S. ally — when its special forces were accused of committing gross human rights violations in Afghanistan. The U.S. publicly revealed it decided not to suspend security cooperation after an internal Australian inquiry sparked a discrete "bilateral training review."
If a specific unit gets identified, it becomes ineligible to receive U.S. military assistance — applying to weaponry, training or any other sort of opportunity that may arise in the future.
The foreign government overseeing the unit, in turn, is then required to demonstrate via an audit to the U.S. government which units are receiving U.S. assistance and how much.
While advocates have long urged successive U.S. administrations to apply Leahy to Israel, no unit has ever been formally implicated for gross human rights violations.
Leahy himself publicly urged then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to investigate in 2016 if U.S. aid contributes to violations of his namesake. Shortly after the October 7 attack, he decried how Israel is held to a different standard than other countries regarding the law.
"Over the years, I've complained, to both Republican and Democratic administrations, about the need to apply the law in Israel," he told the Vermont Community Newspaper Group.
Shapiro further notes that Israel had a carve-out in its agreements with the U.S. that exempted it from providing annual audits to the U.S. on its distribution of military assistance, though Leahy himself attempted to fix that loophole in the 2021 annual defense bill.
It remains unclear whether Israel has officially come into compliance with this, and DAWN and other human rights organizations have been actively investigating whether it has done so.
To that end, however, the Leahy Law and its potential implication would not even cover at least half of the military assistance received by Israel. The majority of U.S. military aid to Israel is via "foreign military financing" — effectively the U.S. giving Israel money to purchase U.S. equipment. Leahy only covers assistance, which is effectively U.S. gifts in the form of equipment.
"It's a bit of 'fake news' to some extent," Shapiro says about Leahy Law's frequent invocation over other U.S. laws on the books concerning holding recipients of U.S. aid accountable.
"No Israeli unit has ever been vetted under the Leahy Law to the point where it got listed. That's what made last week's news so remarkable," he notes.
Whether or not Israeli units have previously been considered, they have either been stopped somewhere along the way or blocked from being considered — further illustrating the delicate and unique nature of such implementation on Israel compared to allies like Colombia.
This is only compounded by the fact that activists pushing for Leahy's application on Israel have focused on high-profile cases such as the killing of U.S. activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003 and the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022.
"People conflate this idea that if there was an action taken under Leahy in those high-profile cases, that it would somehow force some sort of new reckoning or assessment of the strategic relationship and the overall military systems," Shapiro says. "That's partially hyperbole and partially wishful thinking."
Since news emerged of the looming action, Israeli officials, U.S. lawmakers and even senior U.S. officials have pressed Blinken in recent days over the plan to enforce the Leahy Law against the Netza Yehuda battalion.
Israeli legal officials have further been in frequent contact with their U.S. counterparts in recent days over specific complaints concerning Netza Yehudah, attempting to clarify the legal state of various allegations against the unit.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote House Speaker Mike Johnson informing him that the recently passed $14 billion in supplemental military assistance would not be impacted by the Leahy Law, though the subsequent attention misses the point of Leahy entirely.
"The two things are completely separate from each other," Shapiro says, describing it as "somewhat of a delay with the U.S. trying to work with Israel to take some sort of action that looks like justice on Netza Yehuda and other units potentially under consideration."
2024-04-26T22:02:37Z dg43tfdfdgfd