Human Rights

Abstract

American policy on human rights has long been paradoxical. Few concepts are as central to American founding documents, and to the relationship of American citizens to their government, than “inalienable rights” which “Congress shall make no law” to diminish. Almost as central, however, are an intense sense of national sovereignty and suspicion of foreign powers. While the United States helped design the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), the United States has been reluctant to ratify treaties respecting these rights. It took 40 years for the Senate to ratify and implement the Genocide Convention, and the United States is the only country not to have ratified the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), given Somalia’s declaration of intent in May 2002. Perhaps then it is not surprising that when Ambassador David Scheffer returned to Washington in July 1998, having represented the United States as one of seven states to vote against the Rome Statute on an International Criminal Court (ICC), his efforts were hailed by Republicans Jesse Helms and Rod Grams and Democrats Joseph Biden and Diane Feinstein alike.¹ The Rome negotiations developed much like those in Kyoto: the United States forced many changes into a multilateral agreement, distorting it from what most European states preferred, then walked away with a single nonnegotiable demand remaining.