Thoughts About K4D: Why Does the U.S. Government Fail to Ratify Human Rights Conventions

Image source: UNESCO

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the first international declaration proclaiming that all people have certain inalienable rights. It was created in the aftermath of World War II by a committee headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, with the strong support of the United States, and accepted by the United Nations General Assembly.

It was the result of a long historical process:

The two documents most responsible for modern legal formulations of human rights are the American Bill of Rights and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Both of these documents were the result of various social movements in the pre-industrial era. When industrialization took over in Europe and America, becoming an all consuming process, these documents coupled with the previously secularized Judeo-Christian ethical thought became the guiding ideologies in human rights definitions.

The Universal declaration of Human Rights has been hugely influential but it does not have the force of a treaty. It has not been ratified by national governments. Indeed, it is currently under some attack from those who feel that the right to freedom of expression does not extend to the criticism of (their) religion.

There are a number of Covenants and Conventions negotiated under the umbrella of the United Nations that implement protections of rights declared in the Universal Declaration. Each, when ratified by enough nations, becomes international law. According to the United States Constitution, an international treaty that has been ratified by the United States government with the advice and consent of the Senate has the force of U.S. law.

Surprisingly, a number of these Human Rights Conventions have not been ratified by the United States, including:

The Convention on the Rights of the Child and
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

It has been hard to argue that we as a people respect human rights even though we have not ratified these Conventions. Recall that this country was one of the last to execute minors for capital crimes, that we still enlist 17 year olds in the American military, and that we have a small percentage of women in our Congress than the average for developed nations. Still, I believe our human rights record is pretty good overall.

So why do we not ratify these Conventions? The Convention establishing the rights of children has been ratified by 192 other nations, leaving the United States with Somalia as a holdout; the Convention on the rights of women has been ratified by 179 nations. It is embarrassing that we are so isolated in our refusal to support international laws protecting human rights!

The difficulty is illustrated by the fact that Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) with 70 cosponsors has introduced legislation which would amend the U.S. Constitution specifically to prevent ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. According to Politico:

If there were a recipe for creating a new conservative culture-wars issue, it might look something like this: Start with the United Nations, fold in the prospect of an expanded role for government in children’s lives, add some unfortunate court decisions, then toss in Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton.

And indeed, when House Republicans recently found themselves with all these ingredients at hand, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) started pre-heating the oven.

Isolationists, devoted to protecting U.S. national sovereignty against any taint of internationalism, tend to join the Republican Party, as internationalists seeking to have the United States play the role of a good neighbor in the community of nations tend to join the Democratic Party. So the debate on ratification of human rights treaties tends to have a political aspect. Politico is right, however, that the issues are better understood within the context of the cultural wars plaguing the United States.

My own position is clear. The failure of the United States to ratify these conventions weakens the international law protecting children and women. That failure is an indication of a unilateralism that unnecessarily irritates our allies and empowers our adversaries. In general ratification would engender no changes in our domestic law, as we already have laws protecting human rights and indeed the Bill of Rights provides Constitutional protection for most, but were we to need to change domestic law to further guarantee rights seen by most of the world as fundamental, those changes would probably be worth making in their own right.

Working Kids