Democracy's Trojan horse

National Interest, The, Summer, 2004 by John Fonte

Again and again, the NGOs have charged that civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq could have been prevented by the U.S. military. For example, the HRW website condemned air strikes aimed at Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi leaders because they resulted in a small number of civilian deaths. HRW admitted they did not try to find the exact numbers of civilian deaths and retorted that, "focusing on the exact number of deaths misses the point. The point is the U.S. military should not have been using these methods of warfare."

It is important to note that the NGO attack is not simply opposition to the policies of the Bush Administration. America was also pilloried during the Clinton era as a "persistent" violator of human rights and international law. In a 1999 report, Human Rights Watch complained that

   the United States continued to exempt itself
   from its international human rights obligations,
   particularly where international human
   rights law grants protections or redress not available
   under U.S. law. In ratifying key human
   rights treaties it has typically carved away
   added protections for those in the United
   States by adding reservations, declarations,
   and understandings. Even years after ratifying
   key human rights treaties, the U.S. still fails to
   acknowledge human rights law as U.S. law
   [emphasis added].

In contrast, the NGOs believe that if international human rights laws and U.S. laws are in conflict, international laws supersede U.S. laws, even though these international laws have not been approved or enacted into American law by the relevant legislative bodies (Congress or a state legislature) through the normal processes of American constitutional democracy. What these "reservations" declare is that nothing in the international agreement supersedes the U.S. Constitution and laws of the United States. For example, the United States ratified a UN treaty to eliminate racial discrimination but attached reservations stating that hate speech restrictions on free speech in the treaty that were incompatible with the First Amendment would not be accepted by the United States.

One of the clearest examples of post-democratic action by NGOs occurred in connection with the UN Durban Conference Against Racism. About a year before the UN conference, a large group of American NGOs sent a letter to then UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson calling upon the UN to "hold the U.S. accountable" for the "persistent" problems of discrimination that minorities "face at the hands of the U.S. criminal justice system." (4) A spokesman for the group declared that the NGO demands, "had repeatedly been raised with federal and state officials but to little effect.... In frustration we now turn to the United Nations." In other words, NGOs are attempting to make an end run around the democratic process by implementing through international pressure measures that were rejected by Americans in the domestic democratic process.

Take, for example, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW has not been ratified by the Senate, even though Senators Joseph Biden (D-CA) and Barbara Boxer (D-DE) have argued that the treaty is simply an "international bill of rights" for women. But the experience of Britain and other democracies with CEDAW is quite illuminating.