U.S. Quits Treaty on Global Court

Unilateralism is back--or at least that’s what critics of two new Bush administration initiatives here contend.

On Monday, the administration informed the United Nations that it is nullifying the December 2000 U.S. signature on the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, a decision that U.N. officials called unprecedented.

Libya is the only other country that has remained consistently and vociferously opposed to the court’s creation. Although other nations--among them China, Israel, Iraq, Libya, Qatar and Yemen--have expressed opposition to aspects of the court, they have not joined the U.S. in repudiating the treaty.

The administration contends that the court could expose U.S. soldiers and officials abroad to politically motivated “war crimes” prosecutions.

“We regret that this has happened, as we are in favor of the universality of the treaty,” said George Cunningham, a spokesman for the European Commission here.

The treaty was signed by the United States and 138 other countries and has been ratified by 66--including every European Union member except Greece, which plans to approve it soon.

No other nation has ever voided a sovereign signature on a binding international treaty, according to U.N. officials and international law experts. “This action by the U.S. is unique,” said Fred Eckhard, spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “It is unprecedented.”

Also Monday, Bush administration envoys were at the U.N. seeking to remove all references to “reproductive health services” from a document being drafted for adoption at the U.N. Special Session on Children this week--a fight in which it is opposed by most U.N. members, including all its closest Western allies.

U.S. delegates are urging U.N. members to promote sexual abstinence rather than birth control among adolescents.

The U.S. delegation is also objecting to proposed references in the document to the legal rights of children, as enshrined in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. That treaty was adopted without dissent by the General Assembly in 1989, but the United States subsequently refused to ratify the accord, because conservatives in Congress argued that it undermined parental authority.

“They are not only against signing the [child’s rights] treaty--they don’t want it to be the terms of reference for anyone else,” Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women’s Health Coalition, said recently. Somalia is the only other U.N. member that hasn’t ratified the convention on children’s rights.

“You have several important topics ... where we are getting these quite disquieting messages,” said Inocencio Felix Llamas Arias, Spain’s ambassador to the U.N. “The perception in Chile, in Morocco, in India, in Finland, in Spain is that this is unilateralism, and people don’t understand why the leader of the whole world would be embracing unilateralism.”

The Bush administration had been expected to announce its tough stance on the criminal court and the U.N. children’s rights conference around the time of the U.N. General Assembly meeting that was scheduled to take place in late September. But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks forced the postponement of the assembly session--and, more important, triggered a swift reshaping of U.S. strategy in the United Nations.

Now, however, these issues have simultaneously surfaced anew, and some former U.S. diplomats contend that the Bush administration could inadvertently jeopardize the status of other international agreements that the U.S. supports.

“This has very dangerous implications for the whole fabric of international law,” said Timothy Wirth, a former Democratic senator and State Department official who runs Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundation. “If they do this, what does this mean for all the other commitments we have made?”

Monday’s decision, however, was hailed by U.S. critics of the international court and of the United Nations. “Actions taken today by the Bush administration mark a clear victory for American sovereignty over globalism,” said Thomas Kilgannon, director of Virginia-based Freedom Alliance. The U.N. was officially notified in a three-sentence letter on Monday that the U.S. “does not intend to become a party of the treaty.”

Some international law experts have questioned the legality of a retroactive invalidation of a treaty signature, but the U.N. has not--and doesn’t intend to, officials here said Monday.

Some diplomats here who opposed the U.S. action said they nonetheless considered it technically defensible, because signing a treaty is presumed to imply endorsement. Yet even President Clinton, who approved the signing three weeks before he left office, said that he didn’t support the treaty in its current form.

“You could equally say Clinton was not playing by the rules, because signing a treaty should signify an intention to ratify,” said a European diplomat here who asked not to be named.

Bush administration officials made the same argument Monday.

Clinton “made it quite clear from the start that he did not intend to send it to the Senate for ratification and therefore obligate the United States completely in that regard,” said Richard Boucher, a State Department spokesman.