Election-Year Stand on Genocide

One of the stranger pieces of unsecured U.S. diplomatic baggage fell out of the State Department's closet with a clunk last week. A spokesman announced that the Reagan Administration at long last would seek Senate ratification of a United Nations pact denouncing genocide. The move came less than three weeks before the Senate's scheduled adjournment, making formal consent to the document this session virtually impossible. Stranger still, the Administration's sudden backing occurred after 3 1/2 years of silence about the treaty, which has been supported by Reagan's seven immediate predecessors despite its languishing among the Senate's unfinished business for more than 35 years.

Drafted with U.S. help in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, the convention defines "any attempt to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group" as an international crime. The treaty has been approved by 93 nations. U.S. ratification has been blocked repeatedly by Senate adherents of states' rights, who contend that radicals might use it to prosecute segregationists, and by conservative groups that fear it would subordinate American law to international pressure. Reagan's belated support was announced the day before he spoke to the Jewish group B'nai B'rith, which strongly backs the convention.