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MAX HILAIRE
CYIL 4 ȍ2013Ȏ
The United States has played an important role in the development of international
human rights law. It was a strong advocate of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt played a leading role as the chief U.S.
negotiator of the Declaration.
43
The United States also championed the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights. The United States led the negotiation for the passage
of the Genocide Convention, the Convention Against Torture and the many other
human rights conventions adopted by the United Nations in the last fifty years.
Unfortunately, the United States has had a very poor record in ratifying human rights
treaties, and the ones it has ratified have not been implemented in domestic law for
fear that they may grant more rights to American citizens than the United States
Constitution.
44
The United States is the only Western democracy that did not ratify
the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
45
The United States is also the only
western country that continues to carry out the death penalty.
46
Up until recently, the
United States was one of six countries to execute minors for crimes committed before
they were eighteen years of age; the other states are Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia and Yemen.
47
It took the United States four decades to ratify the Genocide
Convention, and when it did, it attached so many reservations, understandings and
declarations to the treaty that it made it impossible to enforce it against the United
States.
48
It is very evident that when it comes to enforcing international human
rights norms the United States has been very selective and operates under a double
standard.
49
During the Cold War, successive U.S. administrations supported and
funded some of the most brutal dictatorial regimes notorious for some of the worst
human rights abuses in history.
The United States has been a strong proponent of international humanitarian law
since its inception. During the American Civil War, President Lincoln commissioned
Professor Lieber of Columbia Law School to draft a code of conduct to govern the
conduct of the war. The result was the
Lieber Code
, which became the first official code
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, May 6, 2002,
available at
http:// 2001-2009. State.gov/r/pa/prts/
ps/2002/9968.htm.
43
Mary Ann Glendon,
A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human
Right
(2001), which provides an extensive analysis of the role played by Eleanor Roosevelt of the
drafting of the Declaration.
44
Jack Goldsmith,
International Human Rights Law & the United States Double Standard, p.
365 (1998).
45
Rosemary Foot,
Credibility at Stake: Domestic Supremacy in U.S. Human Rights Policy,
p. 97, in
David M. Malone & Yuen Foong Khong, eds, (2003).
46
William A. Fletcher,
International Human Rights and the Role of the United States,104 Northwestern
Univ. Law Review,
293, 300, (2010);
See
Amnesty International Survey of Death Penalty States; at
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/deathpenalty-2012.
47
Foot
, ibid.
, p. 97.
48
Jack Goldsmith,
The Unexceptional US. Human Rights RUDS,
3 Univ. of St Thomas Law Review, 311
(2005); Louis Henkin,
U.S. Ratification of Human Rights Conventions: The Ghost of Senator Bricker
, 89
AJIL, 341, 432, (1995).
49
Michael Ignatieff,
American Exceptionalism and Human Rights
, p. 1-26, (2005).