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.
[citation needed] According to Senator Leahy, his law "makes it clear that when credible evidence of human rights violations exists, U.S. aid must stop.
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).
[10] 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.
[12] A prospective aid recipient's unit is searched for evidence of past commission of gross human rights violations.
The State Department has interpreted "gross human rights violations" to mean a small number of the most heinous acts: murder of non-combatants, torture, "disappearing" people, and rape as a tactic.
[citation needed] The State Department's Leahy Working Group determines by consensus which countries are eligible for Fast Track vetting.
The vast majority of requests for assistance are cleared immediately; in 2011, only 1,766 units and individuals out of approximately 200,000 were barred from receiving aid because of gross violations of human rights.
[17] Indonesia's elite Komando Pasukan Khusus (Kopassus) was subject to a 12-year ban on U.S. security assistance after it was implicated in a series of kidnappings and murders of activists in the late 1990s.
[18] In 2010 outrage over extrajudicial killings committed by the armed forces of Pakistan led to the suspension of aid to "about a half-dozen" units of the Pakistani army.
[19] A 2013 report by Freedom House described the Leahy Law as "an invaluable tool in preventing U.S. assistance to military or police units that commit human rights abuses" and added that "it is invoked sparingly and only in egregious cases of specific violence".
This dilemma has a solution embedded in the amendment itself, which provides that if human rights remediation has begun, U.S. assistance can be brought to bear.
[25] A number of observers have complained that the Leahy Act has not been enacted in response to what they have claimed are human rights abuses by the Israeli military.
In 2011, Haaretz reported that Leahy (D-VT), after being approached by constituents in Vermont, was pushing clauses that would bar aid to three elite Israeli military units that have been accused of human rights violations in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
[27] Leahy's Senate webpage[28] repeats his views that while "he has supported Israel's right to self-defense", "he disagrees with restrictions on imports of goods into Gaza as it amounts to collective punishment, with Israel's use of excessive force in Gaza which has caused the deaths of hundreds of civilians, and with home demolitions and settlement construction in the West Bank."
[29][30] In April 2024, ProPublica reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had refused to act on recommendations from the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum to sanction Israeli units that had participated in human rights violations including torture, rape, and extrajudicial killings in the West Bank.
[4] Blaha stated that "information that for any other country would without question result in ineligibility is insufficient for Israeli security force units".