Commentary

September 23, 2007

By Huzir Sulaiman

Why does the United States reject so many international treaties? The answer may lie in its complicated internal politics.  

THERE are only two countries in the United Nations that have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international agreement that spells out the basic protections accorded to children. 

One is Somalia, which has not, of late, enjoyed a fully functioning central government. 

The other is the United States of America. 

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did sign the treaty on behalf of President Clinton in 1995, but it has yet to be sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for consideration. They are the gatekeepers who decide whether international treaties should be brought before the full Senate for ratification. 

Until a treaty is ratified a country is not bound by it. And even then, the United States goes a step further by stipulating that international agreements be “not self-executing.” That means that even if ratified, they do not automatically attain the status of law within the US but have to be backed up by new domestic legislation. 

So where does this leave the Convention on the Rights of the Child? 

In Somalia, there are elements within various existing power structures that have indicated they will be ratifying it as soon as the situation is normalised. But in the case of the United States, there appears to be little hope that the situation will resolve itself soon and that they will join the 193 countries that have ratified this most humane of agreements. 

The principle political objection that has prevented it from coming before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee appears to be the fact that many conservatives are in favour of allowing minors to be given the death penalty. 

This is just one of many such repudiations of the international treaty system. 

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (Cedaw) has been ratified by 185 countries, but not by the United States. (Keeping it company in the club of non-ratifying states is Iran, an unlikely bedfellow.) 

In the case of Cedaw the US signed it in 1980, but 27 years later it has still not gone to a Senate vote. 

This is par for the course. It took more than 25 years for the US to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and 40 years to ratify the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. 

International law, it might be argued, should be renamed nations-except-for-the-United-States law. 

The United States has signed, but not ratified, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions; and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. 

It never signed the Mine Ban Convention; it withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; it ratified the Chemicals Weapons Convention but with so many limitations that it largely neutralised its provisions. 

Most spectacularly, it signed the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court in December 2000 but when it became apparent that it was not going to be able to prevent US troops from potentially being prosecuted under its auspices, President George W. Bush “unsigned” it. 

The irony, of course, is that the United States believes itself to be a champion of the rule of law and an advocate for the advancement of civil and political rights around the world. 

How, then, can we resolve the contradiction of the United States’ global promotion of the very same rights it refuses to accede to in treaty form? 

(We should remember that this is not a recent practice, and cannot therefore be blamed on the Bush administration, but instead dates back through the 20th century.) 

Perhaps the most obvious – and certainly the least charitable – explanation is sheer hypocrisy. This is an accusation generally made by liberal commentators from Europe.  

It is also widely heard in the Malaysian context coming from a broad spectrum of people, including bloggers, NGOs, and Government and Opposition politicians alike. It’s so common an explanation that it might be worthwhile challenging it – frankly, there’s something peculiar about that much unanimity – and examining the reasons that American political scientists themselves give for their nation’s curious position. Not surprisingly, the hypocrisy explanation is not generally heard. 

In his recent writing, Andrew Moravcsik, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, has outlined four explanations for why the United States is reluctant to adopt international norms, particularly with regards to human rights. 

The first reason is that the United States is a superpower, and is so capable of acting unilaterally that it simply isn’t logical for it to voluntarily limit its sovereignty by acting multilaterally. The thinking seems to be: why negotiate when you can do whatever you want? It is only small nations who need to band together and agree on ways they should behave. Indeed, US behaviour is not infrequently backed by other powerful nations, like Russia, France, China, and Britain, who similarly wish to act in an unfettered manner. 

Second, the United States has had a reasonably successful and stable democracy for so long, with a well-established system of judicial review and a high level of awareness created about rights domestically, that it is wary of adopting binding foreign treaties that would override or interfere with what they consider as a system that is already working quite well. (Whether their belief is founded I cannot say, but that is their perception.) 

Third, and I suspect most importantly, there is determined opposition to expanding human rights provisions from conservative constituents. Historically, much American domestic civil rights legislation has been opposed by those with racist or sexist agendas, and these groups tend to take similar positions on international agreements. (The last time Cedaw went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee all those who opposed it were old-school Republicans.) 

Finally, American citizens are said to be suspicious of centralised government. The US has the largest number of elected officials per capita in the world. Local governments and state governments tend to be more important in some spheres than the federal government, creating an atmosphere where a supranational government – as some falsely consider an international treaty to be – is all the more distrusted. 

Moravcsik argues that any of these four factors would work alone, and the fact that they are all operating simultaneously means that opposition to international rights norms is extremely fierce. 

For foreign observers, therefore, the conclusion we should draw is that it is useless to talk about justice or fairness when insisting the United States join the rest of the world in acceding to international agreements. It’s totally beside the point for them. 

We need to talk in terms that they understand, to address their own anxieties and inner debates. And sadly, we will need to do it for decades. 

We had better start soon. 

· Huzir Sulaiman writes for theatre, television, and film. ‘Eight Plays’, a collection of his works for the stage, is published by Silverfish Books. He is currently on a four-month Yale World Fellowship. 

Source: the star magazine