Even Standing Alone, the United States Can Still Be Right

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and of the failure of the United States Senate to ratify the convention, although 191 other nations have already done so. The same fate has befallen similar agreements like the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and last month’s Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Many Americans who think of their country as socially progressive are embarrassed by its failure to endorse these noble-sounding agreements. Yet there is good logic and sound principle behind the decisions to reject them.

The near unanimity of support should itself be a cause for suspicion. Among the champions of children’s rights are the tender dictators of Cuba, Iran, Libya and Iraq. Among the opponents of discrimination against women is Saddam Hussein, a respecter of no rights. Among the endorsers of a test ban is communist China, the most notorious proliferator of nuclear weapons.

There is a simple reason for this: The treaties are all unenforceable.

In the absence of a world government, universal agreements have no teeth. Tyrants who are able to control information and deny their subjects due process to redress their grievances can afford to sign any agreement and then ignore it at will. It was this logic that allowed the communist police states to call themselves “people’s democracies” and to sign arms control agreements during the Cold War that they did not keep.

Universal treaties have a different significance for democracies like ours. Senate ratification of the test ban, for example, would have meant that the United States--an open, democratic (and litigious) society--would have been bound by the terms of the treaty, but that its despotic and treacherous antagonists would not. Opponents did not see benefit in sacrificing America’s ability to defend itself for an abstract goal, arms control, that historically has not worked. (The Antiballistic Missile Treaty, for example, has prevented the United States from developing a shield against missile attack for 15 years, but hasn’t prevented Russia from repeated violations, including the building of an underground shelter the size of Washington.)

A skeptic may interject that military defense is one thing, while the rights of women and children quite another. So what if the test ban treaty is unenforceable in China? Or anywhere else in the world for that matter? Why is this an argument against a convention on children’s rights? Why not embrace the conventions on human rights for their own sakes and spread their benefits at home?

The answer to these questions marks a dividing line between Americans who appreciate and want to conserve the uniqueness of the U.S. Constitution and Americans who want to rewrite it. The Constitution is a contract that has guaranteed the American people more rights over a longer period of time than the written constitution of any other nation. The U.N. conventions are based on a radically different and opposed understanding of the nature of government and civil rights. To sign them would open a Pandora’s box of challenges to our existing, constitutionally based system of laws. Why risk this conflict for an agreement that is at best an empty piety where true oppression is concerned and at worst a fig leaf for that oppression?

In other countries, the U.N. conventions may be toothless, but here they would threaten a system developed over 200 years based on the philosophy of liberal individualism and the ideas of limited government and self-rule.

By contrast, the universal treaties have their origins in the U.N.’s 1947 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unlike our own Bill of Rights, this document regards rights not as strict limits to what government may do but as limitless entitlements to what government must provide. The U.N. conventions are based on a philosophy of collectivism and a vision of the guardian state that has been developed in opposition to the framework created by the American founders. Not surprisingly, the U.N. declaration was supported and ratified by Josef Stalin, the most ruthless tyrant in human history.

Why would we want to step into a quicksand like that?