A panel of Indian-country experts will recommend to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday that tribes be allowed to criminally prosecute non-Indians who sexually or physically abuse Native American children on tribal land, saying that juveniles on reservations are living with “dire” levels of violence and poverty.
The recommendation addresses a loophole in a law passed by Congress last year. The measure allowed the nation’s 566 federally recognized tribes for the first time to prosecute non-Indians who commit certain crimes of domestic violence against Native Americans in Indian country. But the law, opposed by most Republican lawmakers, does not allow non-Indians to be prosecuted by tribes for abusing Indian children on a reservation.
Closing that loophole is one of 31 wide-ranging recommendations made by the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee on American Indian and Alaska Native Children Exposed to Violence in a 120-page report obtained by The Washington Post. The committee, which conducted four public hearings this year — in North Dakota, Arizona, Florida and Alaska — is releasing the report Tuesday morning.
[For more of this story, written by Sari Horwitz, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/...4c461eab6_story.html]
Don't miss the webcast of this hearing on November 19th at 2 PM EST! http://www.indian.senate.gov/h...al-health-preventing
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