Why the U.S. Shouldn’t Sign On to Empty Human Rights Treaties
They’re a propaganda exercise for many of the world’s most unsavory nations.
By <
http://www.slate.com/authors.eric_posner.html> Eric Posner|Posted, Dec.
24, 2012, at 7:22 AM ET
This month, the Senate by a vote of 61-38 failed to amass the two-thirds
majority needed to approve the U.N.
<
http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml> Convention
on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities. The treaty’s supporters,
lamenting America’s broader reluctance to join international human rights
treaties, snorted at the vote and lampooned the antediluvian (but not
prelapsarian) Republicans who shot the convention down. And it’s true that
there are about a dozen human rights treaties, the vast majority of
countries have ratified them, and the United States, frequently, has not.
And rightly so. These treaties are little more than a collective
back-scratching exercise involving many of the world’s most unsavory
nations: The United States does well to keep its distance.
To understand why the United States is an outlier, one must begin with
America’s unusual voting rules for approving treaties. Virtually no other
country requires two-thirds approval from the legislature. Our system
enables interest groups to block treaties by stiffening the spines of a few
senators already temperamentally submerged in the isolationist right.
Supporters of the treaty argue that the disabilities treaty doesn’t actually
obligate the United States to do anything that is not already incorporated
in U.S. law. (Most of the other human rights treaties do not either.)
Moreover, the globalists continue, treaties like this one are a free lunch.
While not obligating the United States to compromise its values or
interests, they do obligate other countries—including the authoritarian
countries that routinely ratify these treaties—to improve their treatment of
their people. Why would the United States object to such a good deal?
One learns little by examining the arguments of the critics of the
disabilities treaty. One of their
<
http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/un-treaties/239095-demint-holds-up-
un-disabilities-treaty-as-home-school-opposition-grows> claims is that the
disabilities treaty would prevent Americans from homeschooling disabled
children (don’t ask). Many critics reflexively invoke “sovereignty costs,”
as though any treaty must be unacceptable if it could reduce America’s
freedom of action, but the United States has entered thousands of treaties.
Trade treaties, military alliances, and environmental treaties limit our
actions somewhat but also generate considerable benefits for the country.
Still, supporters of the disabilities convention go too far when they claim
that this treaty would impose no costs on the United States at all. One
obvious but overlooked point is that the word “disability,” is not
self-defining; nor are other key terms. Reasonable people can disagree about
what sorts of conditions count as a disability entitling one to legal
privileges. Currently, U.S. courts resolve these disputes, and Congress can
revise their interpretations. If the treaty binds the United States, then it
is possible that the views of other parts of the world could come into play.
Other human rights treaties have given rise to such interpretive disputes.
For example, Europeans frequently argue that a provision of a treaty
ratified by the United States that bans “cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment” forecloses the death penalty.
The disabilities treaty also prevents the United States from repealing or
narrowing its disabilities law. Now that may not be likely, but one must
still ask why the United States should remove from democratic politics an
area of policy that just 20 years ago was considered open for debate. To be
sure, the United States could exit the treaty if it wanted, after giving
notice, but then in what sense does it really bind? (Other human rights
treaties lack withdrawal clauses; the United States could withdraw only with
the consent of other treaty parties, raising this question: Why if we want
to modify our law we should first have to ask for the permission of
countries like Azerbaijan, Benin, and Cuba?)
So human rights treaties may impose some small costs to democracy. What
about the benefits? That free lunch is less than nutritious: Academic
research has suggested that human rights treaties either
<
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=311359> do not improve
human rights at all or do so
<
http://www.amazon.com/Mobilizing-Human-Rights-International-Domestic/dp/052
1712327> very little, for a limited group of treaty rights, and among a
select group of countries, not the worst offenders. In addition, U.S.
failures to ratify other human rights treaties have not stopped nearly all
other countries from doing so. And it is unclear why states would think they
can ignore their treaty obligations just because the United States has not
taken them on.
Then there’s the question of whether it makes sense to impose Western-style
standards for disability rights on other countries. Poor countries face many
problems. A country that is required to build ramps and elevators for
disabled people has less money to build health clinics for sick people and
schools for children. Governments must make trade-offs, and we in the West
really have no idea what these trade-offs should be in Angola or Suriname.
The impulse behind the human rights regime bears more than a passing
resemblance to the naïveté with which the West has supplied poor countries
with power plants, dams, and other development projects that turn out to
cause more harm than good, as
<
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143038826/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=sla
tmaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0143038826>
William Easterly and other development economists have documented again and
again.
So why do other states enter all these treaties in the first place? In 1936,
Stalin engineered the ratification of the
<
http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1936toc.html> Soviet
Constitution, which guaranteed rights to free speech, religious freedom, due
process, work, rest, and all sorts of other good things—even while he was
sweeping political opponents into the gulag. Stalin considered his
constitution a propaganda coup. And while he did not fool everyone, he
fooled a lot of people, including many influential Western intellectuals.
Today, there are many countries with sham constitutions like the Soviet
Constitution. A recent
<
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1989979> paper by two
law professors, David Law and Mila Versteeg, lists dozens that promise the
moon in terms of constitutional rights but flagrantly violate most of them.
You might think of these countries’ participation in human rights treaties
in the same light as their constitutions, as a kind of propaganda, albeit
blessed with the imprimatur of the leading liberal democracies, aimed at
ignorant, especially Western, observers.
If you need evidence, consider a country like Uzbekistan, a party to the
convention protecting the rights of the child, and a place where, according
to Human Rights Watch, there is “Government-sponsored forced child labor
during the cotton harvest.” Or Saudi Arabia, a party to the convention
banning discrimination against women (“girls and women of all ages are
forbidden from traveling, studying, or working without permission from their
male guardians”). Or Vietnam, a party to the treaty that guarantees
political freedoms (“systematically suppresses freedom of expression,
association, and peaceful assembly”). Or China, a party to the treaty that
bans torture (“forced confessions under torture remain prevalent”). Or
Nigeria, a party to the convention outlawing racial and ethnic
discrimination (“State and local government policies that discriminate
against … people who cannot trace their ancestry to what are said to be the
original inhabitants of an area continue to exacerbate intercommunal
tensions and perpetuate ethnic-based divisions.”). (All quotations from
Human Rights Watch’s <
http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012> 2012 World
Report.) Or consider India, which ratified a treaty that confers a right to
housing, and yet is unable to house tens of millions of homeless Indians who
live in shanties on streets and garbage dumps. The nine most repressive
countries of 2011,
<
http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/worst-worst-2012-worlds-
most-repressive-societies> Freedom House‘s “Worst of the Worst,” including
Eritrea, Syria, and Turkmenistan, belong to most of the major human rights
treaties.
The human rights regime is a vast international Potemkin village, a kind of
communal effort among states to deceive one another and mainly their
citizens, or an excrescence of the bureaucratic imperative to deny error and
bad intentions, using whatever legal forms happen to be available. Think of
it as the modern version of the brass band and fancy bunting that surround
the dictator while he harangues the crowd. Fine if other countries want to
do that, but why should we be complicit?
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Received on Mon Dec 24 2012 - 08:21:46 EST
