LONDON, 5 October — In last month’s speech to the UN General Assembly President George Bush spoke of “broken treaties” and UN resolutions being “unilaterally subverted”. Yet the United States has one of the worst records of all when it comes to bypassing or subverting important UN resolutions. The US has a long history of continuing to use international law when it works in its favor and to discredit it when it is not.
For example, the US filed suit against Iran before the International Court of Justice (the World Court) for taking US diplomats as hostages. Yet, only four years later, when Nicaragua took the US to the World Court for mining the harbor of its principal port, the US refused to accept the court’s jurisdiction. In 1988, the World Court ordered that an execution of a Paraguayan citizen in the US be suspended. It argued that under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which the US is a party, the accused had the right to seek assistance from Paraguayan consular officials, which had been denied. Five days later, ignoring the court, the state authorities in Virginia proceeded with the execution. A similar case was the execution of a Mexican in Texas in 1997. He too was denied consular access. After his execution, Governor George Bush stated that since Texas had not signed the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations it was not bound by it.
The US has the worst record of any Western country, not only in observing international human rights treaties, but also in ratifying them. And often ratification when it finally passes through Congress is saddled with reservations.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (later used by Washington to justify its campaign against the “ethnic cleansing” policies of Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia) was ratified by Congress in 1988, 40 years after the US signed it.
The US took 28 years to ratify the International Convention on All forms Of Racial Discrimination after 133 other states had already ratified it. Similarly, 71 states ratified the Convention Against Torture before the US decided to do so. It was 26 years before the US ratified the International Convention on Civil Rights, an instrument which it waged a long campaign to persuade China to sign up to, and which it now uses to upbraid China’s human rights abuses. Only two countries in the world have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child — the US and the collapsed state of Somalia.
The US has been particularly adept at watering down the commitments it has made. For example, it has declared that it will apply the International Covenant Against Torture only to the extent that domestic law allows. It has also made informal reservations on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, even though some of them are contrary to the object and aims of the treaty. Article 6.5 of the covenant prohibits passing a death sentence on anyone under the age of 18 at the time of their crime. Yet the US has entered a reservation.
Amnesty International has just released two grim reports on child executions. They argue that the US continues to defy the United Nations and to flout international law. “Two thirds of the known child executions in the past decade were carried out in the USA. It is clear that the US is the world’s leading perpetrator of this universally condemned human rights violation”. In the state of Louisiana seven people are on death row awaiting execution for crimes committed when they were 16 or 17.
Since 1993 Amnesty has documented 24 executions of children — one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one in Nigeria, one in Yemen, two in Pakistan, three in Iran and 16 in the US. Pakistan and Yemen have since announced they will abolish the use of the death penalty in such cases, as has China, the world’s principal execution state.
At the same time that the US is (rightly) trying to pressure Iraq to abide by UN resolutions it is engaged in all-out attempt to undermine one of the UN’s most important recent creations, the International Criminal Court to try crimes against humanity. Despite President Clinton having signed the statute creating the court, the Bush administration has waged war against it.
This week the European Union, subjected to withering pressure by the US, appears to have decided to allow individual European countries to sign “impunity agreements” with the US to exempt American military or official personnel from prosecution by the court. But what is sauce for the goose is good for the gander. Why should other countries not exempt their nationals? The legitimacy of the court is undermined before it even opens its doors. Such is the depth of the US respect for the solemn international will to find a suitable way of trying and punishing the world’s worst criminals.
For many years now the US has worked to effectively undermine the writ of the United Nations. How ironic that Washington, apropos of Iraq, is demanding that its other members now live up to its Charter.
