ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 23, 1997 TAG: 9701240003
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL FARRIS
AMIDST the predictable rhetoric and flattery in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Ashcroft posed a truly important question to Secretary of State-designate Madeleine Albright.
Sen. Ashcroft expressed concern over the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child because it represents a class of treaties that give the United Nations jurisdiction over issues that have historically been considered to be purely domestic.
The U.N. children's treaty requires signatory nations to ban spanking of children by their parents and ban incarceration of juvenile offenders, and it requires educational choices of parents to be reviewed by government to ensure that the child's wishes have been "appropriately weighed." The American Bar Association has published a pro-treaty book that acknowledges that a 10-member committee of U.N. experts is given jurisdiction to authoritatively interpret the meaning of the treaty's numerous provisions.
What this means in practical terms is that most policy questions concerning education and child-rearing would ultimately be subject to review by this U.N. committee of 10. Technically, this committee would have no direct enforcement power, but U.S. courts would be bound to apply and enforce the treaty in a manner consistent with the U.N. committee's rulings on the meaning of treaty language.
For example, this committee ruled in 1995 that Great Britain violates the treaty by allowing parents to opt their children out of public-school sex-education courses. The U.N. believes that the child's views must be first "weighed" by the government. That ruling would be binding on American courts as to the meaning of the treaty's provisions.
Ashcroft asked Albright whether this was a legitimate role for foreign policy. Why should such an area of obvious domestic concern be subjected to any review at the international level?
Albright responded with assurances that the State Department is in the process of preparing appropriate reservations. She assured the Missouri senator that her 183 colleagues from other nations at the United Nations would vouch for the fact that no one was a stronger supporter of U.S. sovereignty. While she undoubtedly was a stronger supporter of U.S. sovereignty than the representatives of other nations, her response is fundamentally unsatisfactory for two reasons.
First, any reservations that the State Department recommends will still leave some aspects of the treaty in place and effective. If none of it is effective in this country, why ratify it? If any of the treaty is effective in this country, then we have turned at least some questions of child and family policy over to the U.N. for its ultimate review. The correct amount of international review of our domestic policy on children, education and families is zero.
Second, Article 51 proclaims that the United Nations reserves the right to reject any nation's reservations that are incompatible with the central purposes of the treaty. Albright has to know this. She is the U.S. official who officially signed the treaty on America's behalf.
Despite Albright's assurances, her own answer demonstrates that she is willing to cede at least some of our sovereignty to the U.N.
The issue of ceding U.S. sovereignty to international organizations and treaties has been an ongoing fight during the whole of the 20th Century. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge fought the notion of domestic policy being controlled by diplomacy in 1920 when Woodrow Wilson tried to push the League of Nations upon our country. Lodge succeeded in getting a reservation attached to the League of Nations treaty that prohibited the League from deciding any questions of domestic policy. Wilson's opposition to Lodge's reservations were the principal reason for the defeat of the League's ratification.
In 1954, a proposed constitutional amendment would have permanently cured the problem that Albright's philosophy represents.
Ohio Sen. John W. Bricker believed that international agreements such as the United Nations' human-rights agreements would supersede American laws and the supremacy of the Constitution over all treaties. His proposed amendment provided that "a treaty shall become effective as internal law in the United States only through legislation which would be valid in the absence of a treaty."
Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, his secretary of state, vigorously opposed this amendment, and it fell short by a single vote in the Senate in 1954.
The fundamental problem with the use of diplomacy to affect domestic policy is that it tears at the fabric of our republican form of government. We are entitled to elect the leaders who make the laws that govern our lives. That is the essence of self-government in a republic.
We do not elect the members of the United Nations. In fact, many of the governments in the U.N. are not even elected by their own people, much less the people of this country. It is a complete repudiation of the principle of self-government to turn American domestic policy questions over to the jurisdiction of an unelected international bureaucracy.
Albright has proved herself to be a willing player on the international stage to use diplomacy to trump democracy.
Michael Farris is a constitutional lawyer and was the 1993 GOP nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia.
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Bob Newman/Newsdayby CNB