My post yesterday prompted one comment and a couple private e-mails, pointing out why there is so much reluctance in the US to ratify the UNCRC. If you're curious, you can read some of the reasons at Parentalrights.org. Some hot issues include the erosion of parental rights, elevating the authority of government (and the UN) over how parents raise their children, the prohibition of spanking, and granting children some questionable rights (such as a "right to be heard" and a right to leisure). These are all important issues worthy of debate. Frankly, I'm sympathetic to some of these concerns and can understand why the US has not ratified the convention. According to one of my friends, the real marvel about the UNCRC isn't that the US has refused to sign it; it's that 193 countries in the world have. In his view, this makes the UNCRC simply a joke. I certainly see his point.
But here's the conundrum I'm pondering; when it comes to politics, appearance is often more important than reality. Let's say the Taliban stages a massacre and falsely claims that fifty women and children were killed by a US airstrike. There can come a point when the truth no longer matters to the strategic outcome; the mere perception of US aggression has a bigger strategic impact than the event (or non-event) itself. Creating the outcomes we want depends heavily on managing perception.
The UNCRC has flaws that make the US understandably reluctant to ratify it, but by refusing to do so, the US is damaging its reputation on human rights and contributing to a perception of hypocrisy. At least some of the 193 countries which ratified the treaty have little or no intent of enforcing it; they are playing the perception game. The US is not playing that game, and is consequently paying a price in legitimacy on human rights issues. How do we escape this dilemma?
This is important because the dilemma doesn't just apply to the UNCRC; it applies to many international agreements.
If anyone has any thoughts, I'm all ears.
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2 comments:
According to Wikipedia, "The United States government played an active role in the drafting of the Convention. It commented on nearly all of the articles, and proposed the original text of seven of them. Three of these come direct from the United States Constitution and were proposed by the administration of President Ronald Reagan." It seems strange that the US, particularly during the '80s, wan not able to secure a version of the Convention more to its liking. At any rate, you're correct that the US is not playing the perception game successfully, to its own detriment. Perhaps as a starting point, the US could, apart from this Convention, take a serious and unambiguous issue confronting children - human trafficking and sexual slavery, say - and lead a well-funded, highly-publicized, multilateral international effort against it. The UNCRC has 54 articles; the US might benefit from drafting some brief, direct resolutions which directly target specific issues as opposed to getting bogged down in dubious, interminable all-or-nothing conventions.
It is a deception game. It is a common tactic to use deception to speak for your opponent in a forum where your opponent can not speak for himself (last minute campaign adds, national media, etc). Thus, not signing the charter is used to say we endorse everything that charter would hope to ban and that our values are the same as Somalia. There are very legitimate reasons for not signing and those need to be articulated. To agree simply to quiet our opposition would be to surrender our integrity and truly compromise the legitimate concerns that exist with the UNCRC.
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