Defendant Joe Sullivan, now 33, is represented by Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization. Mr. Stevenson maintains that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the cruel and unusual punishment characterizing such sentencing of youths under 14. In a quote from the New York Times, Mr. Stevenson comments, “To say to any child of 13 that you are only fit to die in prison is cruel. It can’t be reconciled with what we know about the nature of children.”

Bryan S. Gowdy, the lawyer for convicted juvenile offender Terrance Graham, expressed skepticism about a case-by-case determination of juvenile crimes not involving murder, saying, “At that age we cannot make a determination about whether or not the adolescent will or will not reform.”

These cases have received immense media attention and responses from practitioners at the frontline of health care and criminal justice for youths.

Drawing from his global health and justice work with children, Paul Farmer commented yesterday in a Boston Globe Op-Ed about the issues at stake in these Supreme Court hearings:

These are serious crimes and both young men must be held accountable. The question before the court is whether they should be held accountable in a way that takes into consideration their immaturity, lack of judgment, vulnerability to peer pressure, and – perhaps most important – their capacity for redemption, growth, and change. If the court strikes down life without parole for juveniles as unconstitutional, no offender would have an automatic right to parole release. Juvenile offenders would simply be given the opportunity to appear before a parole board and make the case that they have changed and deserve another chance.

 

Article 37 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children must not be subjected to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishments, including capital punishment or life imprisonment without the possibility of release. Only two nations in the world have not ratified this convention: Somalia and the United States. It is noteworthy that sentences of life without parole for juveniles were uncommon in the United States before the 1990s, a period of fear about a potential rise in juvenile crime that was based on data later proven false.

 

There are those who argue that international laws and norms should have no bearing on how the United States decides to dispense justice. But having treated thousands of children all over the world, I can say with confidence that American children are not more vicious, less human, or less deserving of mercy and compassion than children in any other country. Every other nation in the world finds ways to hold young people accountable for their actions without sentencing them to languish in prison until they die. The United States must do the same for its children.

Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, is professor of social medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he is chairman, and is cofounder of Partners In Health, an international nonprofit health care organization. He is the author of “Pathologies of Power’’ and co-editor of “Global Health in Times of Violence.’’

First, the US has long used both international agreements and domestic law to govern its citizens — the US has been and continues to be a party to hundreds of international treaties (including UN human rights-based treaties) each year while maintaining the process of creating and enacting domestic laws. In fact, the US is depositary for over 200 international treaties, including the Charter of the United Nations, which first established the UN. American lawmakers rely on both bilateral and multilateral treaties, as well as the domestic legislative process, as tools for governance.

Further, international treaties, as opposed to executive agreements, must be presented to the US Senate, which gives advice and two-thirds of which must support ratification. In that way, the process by which the US ratifies international treaties is as democratic as the practice by which the US makes domestic laws, in that both require the approval of a democratically elected legislative body.

Second, the US has historically considered UN treaties to be “non-self-executing,” meaning that ratification of a treaty does not override existing US law or create new legislation. Further clarification of this policy came from Medellin v. Texas, 552 US (2008), in which the Supreme Court recognized the “distinction between treaties that automatically have effect as domestic law, and those that . . . do not by themselves function as binding federal law” and stated definitively that

while treaties “may comprise international commitments . . . they are not domestic law unless Congress has either enacted implementing statutes or the treaty itself conveys an intention that it be ‘self-executing’ and is ratified on these terms.” [cited from Igartúa-De La Rosa v. United States 417 F. 3d 145, 150 (2005)]

Later, the court further states that

[t]he terms of a non-self-executing treaty can become domestic law only in the same way as any other law — through passage of legislation by both Houses of Congress, combined with either the President’s signature or a congressional override of a Presidential veto.

Essentially, an international treaty must be stated to be self-executing in order for the US to consider it to be self-executing, and the normal legislative process must be followed in order to apply the principles of a non-self-executing treaty to domestic policy. As the Supreme Court stated, “[o]nce a treaty is ratified without provisions clearly according it domestic effect,” the domestic application of the treaty is decided by Congress alone.

As neither the Convention on the Rights of the Child nor the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women has language that declares the treaties to be self-executing, they would not be considered so under US domestic law. In order to implement the principles found in treaties, the US must follow the normal state or national legislative processes by which new laws are made. This means that elected legislators will continue to “write and vote on the laws that govern us domestically,” as they have always done.

Finally, the US, along with any nation, is allowed to add individual declarations and reservations to any treaty prior to ratification. In fact, the US added several understandings to the ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child:

The United States understands that the United States assumes no obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child by becoming a party to the Protocol. . . . The United States understands that nothing in the Protocol establishes a basis for jurisdiction by any international tribunal, including the International Criminal Court.

For the reasons stated above, the claim that the treaty-making process robs the United States of its law-making ability is just not true. The use of implementing legislation and individual declarations protects that right.  That being said, critics claim the use of these policy-making tools waters down the internationally agreed to measures they address and that, when it comes to treaties related to human rights, the United States tends to over-use these tools.

In a New York Times op-ed, former South Dakota Democratic senator James Abourezk recently called for President Obama to restore the town land of Whiteclay to the Oglala Sioux of Pine Ridge, which would effectively render alcohol sales illegal. In the late 1800s, President Chester Arthur, issuing an executive order, created a 50-square-mile buffer zone on the reservation’s southern border, in Nebraska. Its intent was “to prevent renegade whites from selling guns, knives and alcohol to Indians living on the reservation.” Teddy Roosevelt, with the liquor industry in his ear, overturned the order in 1904.

Abourezk argues that Whiteclay’s liquor sales contribute to “murders, spouse beatings, child abuse, thefts and other undesirable consequences of the free flow of alcohol into the reservation.” His op-ed came a few months after the release of Battle for Whiteclay, a documentary that follows a group of activists as they try to abolish alcohol sales in the town. The film’s website states that the liquor stores regularly flout Nebraska laws by “selling beer to minors and intoxicated persons, knowingly selling to bootleggers who resell the beer on the reservation, permitting on-premise consumption of beer in violation of restrictions placed on off-sale-only licenses, and exchanging beer for sexual favors.”

Abourezk ended his column by writing that “President Obama could right a century of wrongs by re-establishing the buffer zone. It would alleviate the overwhelming social ills that result from easy access to alcohol, and help end the violence tribal members too often visit on each other and on their families.”

While it is indisputable that the liquor stores are preying on a vulnerable population, the problems at Pine Ridge go beyond drink. There are, for example, the reservation’s crushing poverty, sky-high unemployment rates, dismal health statistics, and treatment options (or lack of) for those suffering from addiction. Would presidential redress that restores the buffer zone be enough to “right a century of wrongs”? And while it may be a start, is it the right one?

Unemployment at Pine Ridge stood at 89% of the labor force in 2005. Located in Shannon County, one of the poorest counties in the nation, average family income on the reservation is $3,700. Just under 95% of the county’s citizens are American Indians, and 45% of families and 52% of individuals live under the poverty line. The director of Oglala Sioux Lakota Housing said a few months ago that the reservation needs 4,000 new homes for its 40,000 residents. And men on Pine Ridge have, after Haiti, the lowest life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere (48 years); for women, it’s 52. Half of Pine Ridge residents over 40 have diabetes.

Another challenge is that of providing access to culturally appropriate treatment and rehabilitation centers to help prevent the well-documented alcohol-related deaths among community members. This paper points out that the behavioral health care network for American Indians is both complex and fragmented. Pine Ridge, for example, doesn’t have a treatment center. And while over 90% of customers at the Whiteclay liquor stores are from Pine Ridge, if they are jailed in Nebraska for drinking-related offenses, they aren’t eligible for Nebraska’s subsidized treatment centers — those are for state residents.

Abourezk’s op-ed garnered a response from journalist Stew Magnuson, author of The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder: And Other True Stories from the Nebraska-Pine Ridge Border Towns. Magnuson wrote, “[T]hose with even a passing familiarity with the situation in Pine Ridge know that the president will not be able to wave a magic wand, create a buffer zone and alleviate the social ills there,” emphasizing that “what is really needed on Pine Ridge and in many other places in Indian Country [are] [b]etter schools, more jobs and alcohol and drug rehabilitation centers.”

Magnuson’s point is an important one: the problem must be attacked on all levels. Certainly re-establishing the buffer zone may be a significant and symbolic step. But attacking the root causes of the area’s widespread alcoholism — poverty, unemployment, lack of culturally appropriate treatment centers, and lack of positive opportunities — is just as crucial, if not more so.

For more information:

Youtube.com: Battle for Whiteclay

The Oregonian: Native American doctor focuses on problems of addiction

Associated Press/Nebraska.TV: Organizers of Whiteclay blockade encouraged

Nebraska Statepaper: A different perspective on Whiteclay

Lincoln Journal Star: A place called Dewing

USA Today: Battle over beer brews on border

OpenForum: A “historic failure”: American Indian health care suffers

American Journal of Public Health: The persistence of American Indian health disparities

With my counterpart from the Montana Human Rights Network, I set out this August to conduct focus groups in Lewis and Clark County, western Montana, to explore people’s health needs and their experiences with the local health care system. To our relief, we did not attract town hall size groups ready to vent their engineered hate, but we also did not fully escape the ugly reverberations of Fox News and Talk Radio. Some people with low incomes and very limited access to health care looked with disdain to the perceived health needs of others — particularly to those who had already been “othered” by decades of right-wing ideology (immigrants, the poor) — as an explanation for their own unmet needs. The community spirit of a frontier area sat in uneasy tension with the blaming game promoted on the airwaves from far away.

Yet we also heard plenty of other voices, from the poor to the privileged, who reported barriers to insurance coverage, a shortage of doctors, and a lack of respect for human beings in need, and who  openly welcomed the notion of health care as a human right for all, regardless of ability to pay.

This reflects the other aspect of the national debate, in which the human right to health care has gained enormous traction over recent months. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal serves as a suitable indicator — hardly a week passes in which this organ of US capitalism doesn’t feature a rant against the human right to health care. But we only have to look at the town hall meetings themselves to gauge the growing support for rights-based health care: meetings in which the question of the right to health care was raised, affirmed, or in which it dominated entirely.

Those other voices also give insight into the other, non-clichéd reality of Montana. Montana is a state represented almost exclusively by Democrats, and its progressive history fuels vibrant grassroots activism on health care, from the Network’s Human Right to Health Care campaign to numerous active and committed single payer groups, which recently gave Senator Baucus a run for his hard-earned health industry money. There is no shortage of courageous and innovative initiatives either: a Montana State Senator, Christine Kaufmann, introduced a constitutional amendment for the right to health care, and a local Board of Health — driven by the commitment of a Helena city commissioner whose spirited support for the right to health care can be heard here — recognized health care as a human right and set up a residents’ task force to determine how to ensure universal access to health care locally. Our ongoing field research has been designed to support the pioneering work of this task force, which will continue its work for and with the people of Lewis and Clark County beyond the fanfare of the right-wing media circus.

I spent much of my life working in the non-profit sector, only recently deciding to try my hand at working inside the “system.” I designed a health reform project for the King County Board of Health based upon international human rights principles and was able to secure a consulting position through which I assisted board members in advocating for them with the general public, health organizations, and members of the state and federal legislature. It wasn’t easy, and it continues to be an education. As I describe in my upcoming article in Volume 11, Number 1 of Health and Human Rights, working to persuade elected officials to adopt and enact human rights concepts often requires finding ways to make them look good for doing so.

Our recent press conference provides a good example of how these dual goals were met throughout the project. The press conference both highlighted the chair of the board of health and promoted health and human rights standards; because I was a county consultant, I didn’t have to do it alone — I had access to the county communications team, the county press conference room, and county media facilities (TV and internet).

In order to make the event press worthy, I brought together the chairs of the boards of health from five other counties (all of whom are elected officials). These six counties together represent over 60% of the state population and, as provided in the press release, the health of over 4 million people. My belief was that a joint statement from a group representing such a significant proportion of the state population would be of greater interest to the media and the public.

To prepare for the conference, I worked with the public health staff in each county to have their respective boards accept King County’s health reform principles (which incorporate international human rights standards), select the speakers, and prepare the talking points.

The King County Board chair, King County Council member, Julia Patterson, introduced and welcomed everyone to the conference. She spoke to why local government engagement in health reform was essential, and she described the board’s health reform principles. She also stated that local governments wanted health reform this year and that reform should address community health and the underlying determinants of health, not just medical care. Each board member expanded upon this — by commenting on specific public health programs, telling compelling stories about their constituents, or speaking philosophically about how health care was a public good that should not lend itself to profit making.

To supplement these statements, I prepared a list of frequently asked questions on health reform and suggested answers for each speaker. We put together a press packet that contained information about public health and human rights principles, a copy of a letter in support of health reform signed by the participants and sent to federal lawmakers, a list of the county legislation supporting health reform, and a list of effective, community-based health programs in each county.

The conference received good press coverage. Television, radio, and print media from Seattle attended the event, and media from other counties participated by speaker phone. Questions from reporters were as expected: Why should local governments be interested in federal health reform; why would local governments be taking on a “partisan” issue when health boards were non-partisan; and why would community-based interventions have an impact on individual health?

Through answering these questions, the board members were able to provide those present, and ultimately the general public, information and education about health and health care reform without the disruptions and fear mongering that have been so prevalent at town hall meetings. They were also able to explain how their collective concern about community and individual health had brought them together, across party lines and across the region, to promote health reform.  The outcome was three clips on local TV stations, two radio stories, two internet publications, and three newspaper articles throughout the six counties.

On August 23, the New York Times reported that the CDC may recommend infant male circumcision as an HIV-prevention strategy. This article was followed by an editorial in the Boston Globe on August 26. The editorial states that infant male circumcision “makes sense [as a tactic] against a virus that infects more than 50,000 Americans each year” and that circumcision “deserves the CDC’s support.” These statements are based on the results of clinical trials in Africa showing that circumcised men were approximately 60% less likely to become infected with HIV than their uncircumcised counterparts. Unfortunately, the two numbers that the editorial cites — the 60% reduction in HIV transmission and the 50,000 new infections in the US every year — have very little to do with each other.

Let’s look first at the reduction in HIV transmission associated with male circumcision. In 2005, a group of French and South African researchers reported that adult male circumcision provided 60% protection (95% confidence interval: 32%–76%) from HIV infection to the circumcised men over a period of approximately 18 months in a South Africa-based trial. In 2007, two other studies completed in Africa, one in Uganda and one in Kenya, reported similar levels of reduction in the risk of HIV transmission. These clinical trials suggested that promoting adult male circumcision may be a way to reduce HIV transmission in certain contexts, particularly those in which HIV prevalence is high (as in the study areas, where prevalence estimates range from 5% to 30%) and where heterosexual transmission is the most common mode of transmission. The situation in the US, however, is markedly different: HIV prevalence is low (0.4%) and transmission of HIV is highest among injecting drug users and men who have sex with men. Thus,  the applicability of the African trials to the American HIV epidemic is severely limited.

The second number cited in the Globe editorial is the number of new HIV infections in the US — 50,000 per year. This number is (apparently) based on a CDC estimate of all new HIV infections in 2006. The CDC also estimated the number of new infections for many different subgroups based on demographics and on mode of transmission. Looking at these data, it becomes immediately clear that the estimated 50,000 new infections every year are predominantly the result of injecting drug use and male-to-male transmission during sexual contact. Heterosexual contact is estimated to be responsible for only 5,250 new infections in men each year in the US — a far cry from the 50,000 infections cited by the Globe’s editorial team.

It is important to note that there is no strong evidence that circumcision reduces the risk of male-to-female or male-to-male transmission via sexual contact. (Although probably obvious, it is also important to note that male circumcision is not related to HIV transmission by injecting drug use.) Therefore, the current data suggest that the 5,250 female-to-male transmissions are the only ones likely to be prevented by male circumcision.

Now let’s factor in the efficacy of circumcision (approximately 60%), ignoring for a moment several important factors — the short time period used to determine efficacy in the clinical trials, the fact that the actual statistics gave ranges for the efficacy (from 22% to 77%), and the fact that the different infection profile in the US limits the trials’ relevance in the US context. If we assume that all 5,250 men who get HIV from a female sexual partner are not circumcised (though this is certainly not the case), the data suggest that about half of these infections — around 2,625 infections or ~5% of new infections — may have been prevented if the men had been circumcised. If we then factor in the number of men who are circumcised when they are infected (approximately 70-80% of American men are already circumcised), the number of infections that could have been prevented by circumcision drops considerably. Taken together, the data suggest that the number of HIV infections that could be prevented in the US by promoting infant male circumcision is likely to be only in the hundreds per year — a tiny fraction of the estimated 50,000 new HIV infections.

Why then are people pushing for infant male circumcision as an HIV-prevention measure here in the US? I can think of two possible explanations. First, proponents may have seen the same numbers that the Globe printed — protection of up to 60% and 50,000 new HIV infections per year — and erroneously concluded that male circumcision could significantly reduce HIV transmission in the US. Erroneous conclusions like this one are common when scientific literature is covered by the mainstream media, in which many important details are often lost. Second, proponents may be (consciously or unconsciously) using HIV prevention as a way to validate subjecting baby boys to medically unnecessary surgery done for cultural or religious reasons — it is a lot easier to defend genital modification (or mutilation depending on one’s viewpoint) if it prevents a deadly disease. (Please note that my argument here is not that circumcision should not be practiced for cultural or religious reasons — I am staying out of that debate here — my argument is that medical data from the African circumcision trials are being inappropriately used to defend and promote a practice done for cultural or religious reasons.)

But given that the majority of men in the US are circumcised anyway, some may ask why the CDC’s possible recommendation of infant male circumcision is such a problem. It is a problem because promoting infant male circumcision could have negative impacts with regard to HIV transmission by inadvertently promoting the idea that “circumcised sex” is safe sex. In the 2005 male circumcision trial in South Africa, men in the intervention (circumcision) group reported having more sexual partners than men in the control (uncircumcised) group. If circumcision is promoted as a way to reduce the risk of HIV transmission, there is a possibility that this disinhibition could happen in the US as well — men may incorrectly assume that they are protected from HIV if they are circumcised, and these men may therefore exhibit more risky behaviors (numerous sexual partners and limited condom use). Proponents are likely to counter this problem by calling for more education to prevent these misconceptions. The question then is why promote medically unnecessary surgery as an HIV-prevention strategy when it also increases the need for proper education on HIV transmission? Why not just educate people and leave out recommendations for surgical procedures of dubious medical value?

The promotion of infant male circumcision also ignores the right of men to not be circumcised as infants — a right that many people and governments dispute. Despite the ongoing nature of the debate as to whether or not infant circumcision is a human rights violation, the fact that many people view infant circumcision as a human rights violation should make the CDC even more hesitant to promote the practice.

A consultant to the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Michael Brady, has said that “families should be given an opportunity to know what [the benefits of male circumcision] are.” On this point, at least, everyone can agree. People in the US — and in all countries — should be educated about any potential benefits of circumcision, but the public should not be fed half-truths or statistics stripped of all meaningful context. Everyone should be told the whole story — a story that does not point to any significant reduction in HIV transmission as a result of promoting infant male circumcision in the US.

Given the problems with promoting infant male circumcision as an HIV-prevention strategy in the US — a low number of prevented infections and the possible misconception that “circumcised sex” is safe sex — the population-level health benefits of promoting infant male circumcision are not clear, and infant male circumcision does not make sense as a US HIV-prevention strategy. Instead of looking for the quick fix, we — and the CDC — should focus our attention on what will work: education.

Education and prevention of HIV transmission:

Lancet: Randomised, controlled, community-level HIV-prevention intervention for sexual-risk behaviour among homosexual men in US cities

AIDS: A peer-education intervention to reduce injection risk behaviors for HIV and hepatitis C virus infection in young injection drug users

Journal of the American Medical Association: Abstinence and Safer Sex HIV Risk-Reduction Interventions for African American Adolescents

Constant harassment and intimidation at abortion clinics continue to limit the ability of abortion providers to do their jobs and of women to obtain abortions in a safe and respectful space. Laws such as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) are meant to stop the often violent harassment that anti-abortion protesters use outside of abortion clinics. However, local and federal law enforcement can be lax in investigating threats: the report notes that the police often do not understand the provisions of FACE, or are unwilling to interfere with what they perceive as “the expected cost of providing abortion.”

Increasingly, anti-abortion groups are using litigation as a strategy to further harass abortion providers and burden law enforcement and the judicial system. For example, an anti-abortion group in Allentown, Pennsylvania sued the city after their protesters were arrested for “trespass, impeding access, racist and sexual taunting, and residential picketing” outside of a women’s clinic. The city eventually settled after a lengthy case, paying $10,000 to each of the 13 protestors. Experiences such as these have made law enforcement officials reluctant to interfere with protests outside clinics for fear of the legal repercussions. In this case, the Allentown City Solicitor told the clinic director that the city could no longer respond to any complaints at the clinic “unless there is a threat to life or person,” effectively admitting to the city’s almost complete inability to enforce the law with regards to abortion protestors.

As seen with Dr. Tiller’s murder, which occurred while he was attending church with his family, this type of violent persecution is not restricted to the healthcare facilities where abortions are performed. Many abortion providers must take certain precautions, such as holding unlisted phone numbers, listing property in a spouse’s name, and wearing bulletproof vests while traveling to and from work. Anti-abortion protestors also use the internet to further harass both providers and women seeking abortions – a group in Texas used car registry information to send out a mass email identifying by name women who entered a Planned Parenthood clinic.

The many dangers involved in providing abortions take their toll on doctors, staff, and the women themselves. Physicians in particular are driven away from performing abortions due to the significant financial expense required to secure their clinic and workers, the social stigma they and their families face, and the risk of physical harm. The number of abortion providers is shrinking, and is likely to only get worse in the future as abortion providers age and retire — the majority of current providers are over 50 years old. Few medical students are given the opportunity to observe or learn how to provide abortions, as most doctors today never saw an abortion performed during medical school, and half of OB-GYN training programs fail to provide routine instruction in abortions. This shortage means that despite the fact that one in three American women will have an abortion in her lifetime, nearly a quarter of women seeking abortions have to travel 50 miles or more to find a clinic.

Even more disturbing, it has become close to impossible to find doctors who will perform abortions after a woman is 24 weeks into pregnancy. Following Dr. Tiller’s murder, Warren Hern is one of only a few doctors to openly acknowledge that he provides late-term abortions. In a recent article, he describes the precautions, including bulletproof glass and protection from US marshals, that he and his staff members must take to protect themselves and the women they provide abortions for. Dr. Tern describes the anti-abortion movement as “a violent terrorist movement, [with] a fascist ideology,” that publicly deplores acts of violence while continuing to push for “cold-blooded, brutal political assassination[s]” such as that of Dr. Tiller.

Despite the danger, Dr. Hern continues to provide abortions at his clinic because he sees it as the most important work he can do in medicine. However, the unrelenting harassment of anti-abortion protestors threatens the reproductive rights of women seeking abortions and the safety of medical professionals that provide them. Violations of these rights by anti-abortion groups must be taken more seriously by law enforcement and local and federal government. Otherwise, acts of violence against abortion providers such as Dr. Tiller will only continue.

Although signing this convention is a positive step toward official recognition of universal human rights principles, the US still remains woefully behind other nations in becoming legally bound to enforcing these human rights. The US has a particularly abysmal rate of ratification of international human rights agreements – of the nine core international human rights treaties created by the UN, only three have been ratified. The only treaties ratified by the US since 1994 have been optional protocols prohibiting the use of children in armed conflict and the sale of children and child prostitution. These protocols are additions to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which the US has not ratified. Somalia and the US are the only nations in the world that have not ratified the convention, which is the most widely and rapidly ratified human rights treaty in history. The US has also failed to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), along with only six other countries, including Iran, Somalia, and Sudan.

Even when the US does sign and ratify treaties, stipulations and alterations have been attached to each convention to impose restrictions on its viability. None of the significant human rights treaties ratified by the US have been accepted “under the guidelines by which it was adopted and enforced by the UN General Assembly.” For example, in the ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the US maintained the right to impose capital punishment and to try juveniles as adults. Although many countries add stipulations clarifying the role of an international treaty in regard to the nation’s domestic laws, restrictions imposed by the US can make legally enforceable international treaties weak and ineffectual.

Reasons cited for the US’s refusal to ratify treaties generally concern the power of international law versus that of the US federal and state governments. Those opposed to US ratification of the CRC usually object to how international standards could undermine parent’s rights to raise their children. However, the CRC requires state parties to respect and take into account the “responsibilities, rights and duties of parents,” and ensures whenever possible that a child be cared for and not separated from his or her parents. The failure of the US to ratify this treaty is a source of international embarrassment, as it requires UN delegates from the US to vote against child protection treaties such as the prevention of violence against children, simply because the US is not a party to the CRC. The US are frequently the only UN member state to vote against such treaties.

Similarly, the US is the only industrialized nation that has not ratified CEDAW. Reservations to ratification generally focus on false beliefs that the treaty ensures all women the right to abortion. In fact, the convention does not mention the word “abortion” once, and the US State Department considers the treaty “abortion neutral.” Concerns about the power of international law in enforcing CEDAW are also cited as explanations for why it has not been ratified; however, accepting a convention does not automatically authorize any US laws not already in place.

The US has also failed to accept weapon bans such as the Mine Ban Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Although the US government was involved in the creation of the treaty, it requested an exemption for mixed antitank and antipersonnel landmine systems. Other member states rejected the request, believing it would substantially weaken the treaty. Because of this, the US did not sign or ratify the treaty – in fact, the Bush administration stated during his presidency that they had no intention of ever signing it. The US has the largest known stockpile of cluster munitions, and is also a lead user and exporter of these weapons. In March of this year, President Obama signed a law banning the export of cluster bombs, moving the US closer to ratification of the international ban.

The State Department is currently reviewing the CRC and CEDAW, and Obama himself has pledged to try for ratification of several international treaties. If the US wishes to be taken seriously as an international human rights leader, its government must ratify human rights conventions. Only in doing so can the US join other states in their commitment to protecting vulnerable populations and promoting respect for human rights.