GOP declares "War on the Disabled", Santorum to lead the charge

[anvi]

Why call for a rejection of the convention outright?  Why not make Senate ratification depend on our attaching reservations and interpretive declarations about provisions of concern onto our ratification, as is standard practice in the UN and as has been done by many countries which have ratified?  Why can't you deal with enforcement concerns that way?

As a disabled person, I find the reasons being given in the story and above for outright rejection annoying.  We shouldn't sign onto any convention if other nations might not live up to the convention's requirements?  International recognition of equal rights to education, access and employment opportunities is "irrelevant"?  Since we're a sovereign nation, we should respect the rights of other sovereign nations to discriminate against disabled people?  Jesus.  

[anvi]

Attaching reservations or interpretive declarations does not require a renegotiation of a convention.  Lots of countries decide to ratify conventions or agreements and just attach their reservations to the ratification, declaring that they won't be bound by some certain set of its provisions, but giving credence to the agreement in the main. 

In addition, let's forget disabilities for a moment; when does international recognition of human rights in general pass from being good to being imperialist?  The U.N. is an organization where every nation gets a vote and every nation decides if it wants to ratify an agreement or not, so we're not exactly talking about forcing another unwilling country to buy opium we've grown in a colony or enforcing a foreign education curriculum on somebody.  We're deciding if we think certain standards of humane treatment should be the aspiration of every nation, and agreeing to live up to those standards ourselves.

Our own laws already measure up to most of the provisions of the persons with disabilities convention the U.N. put forward.  So these guys in the Senate are now saying that, because we're a sovereign nation, we don't want to be held to standards on an international stage that we already hold ourselves up to domestically?  What is that?  And, unless I missed something, I don't remember hearing Lee or Santorum complain about this when the convention was circulated for endorsement in the UN in 2006.  So, again, what is this?   

[anvi]

An optional protocol in a UN treaty of this kind does nothing whatsoever to threaten national sovereignty, ours or anyone else's.  What they do is set up a UN committee that is in charge of receiving scheduled reports from member states as well as receiving complaints.  The committee investigates the complaints, and if they have standing and are judged valid, inform the member states about them, allows the member states to respond to the complaints, and then gives the committee the option of making appropriate recommendations to the member states if reports are not file or if complaints have standing and are judged valid.  Any member state even has the option of rejecting the recommendations.  I read through the entire text of the "Enable" Optional protocol this morning, and there is nothing in it that would trump or contravene the laws of the United States.  Nothing.  If you don't believe me, read it yourselves.

http://www.un.org/disabilities/documents/convention/convoptprot-e.pdf

These guys in the Senate and who used to be there are funny.  They would probably all claim that they believe in certain standards for the equitable treatment of disabled people.  If pressed, they'd probably concede that such standards constitute basic human rights.  The laws now existing in their country already meet the standards of an international body that is asking them to support those values and statutes on an international stage.  But, when the international body asks for their support in advocating and achieving these standards around the world, they want to decline because they don't want anyone to "force" them to believe and do the things they already do--even though we're in fact not being forced to do anything.

Whatever.  If these guys in the Senate and who used to belong to it want this ratification blocked, then they can block it.  But don't tell me it's out of genuine concern for national sovereignty, because that claim is baseless.    

And I wouldn't trust a number of posters above to operate a lemonade stand...so there. 

[anvi]

Sorry if I sound in any way militant in the above.  But, from what I can tell from my direct reading of the proposed Convention, I can't discern how it would force the hand of the American legislative process in any way.  And even if such concerns persisted, I would think attaching some reservations while still ratifying the Convention would suffice.  I do think there is value to bringing shortcomings in treatment of people with disabilities to light, even if the Convention can't directly resolve them.  Bringing attention to social and political problems and thereby exerting at least some moral pressure on perpetrators of discrimination is an important tool of change.  JMO.

[anvi]

I think the concern is more about a US court using the treaty to enforce a particular policy, rather than it being directly enforced by an international body.

Well, after Medellin vs. Texas (2008), the general presumption in the courts, as I understand it, has been that provisions of international treaties have also to be explicitly implemented by U.S. law in order to be enforceable.  That decision invoked a "background presumption" that international treaties do not, by themselves, create "private rights" that can justify a cause of action in domestic courts.  And district courts have since used that presumption to deny causes of action based on international treaty provisions.  So, the worries you are citing are unwarranted both in the terms of the proposed treaty and in terms of recent American jurisprudence. 

But, with regard to Enable, that's all moot now.  So, you know, hooray.   

[anvi]

Speaking for myself, I don't believe this is a matter of personal hatred or any unified party ideology.  Santorum obviously does not hate his daughter nor other disabled people, and there are Republican Senators that voted in favor of ratification.  I do think that the concerns about the treaty somehow trumping U.S. law or being automatically enforceable in American courts are, given the specifics of the treaty and recent American jurisprudence, completely unwarranted.  But I don't believe the opposition is rooted either in personal animus of any kind, nor in any uniform party ideology.

[anvi]

Oh, I think the concerns are ideological in nature.  I don't think the ideological commitments that inform these concerns are uniform across the GOP, since, as you note, McCain voted in favor, as did several others.  I think the Senators who voted against probably just have a problem with UN treaties that might involve complaints being brought against the U.S. on an international stage and they don't want U.S. law to be judged in the visible light of an international body.  Of course, as Ernest pointed out above, some of them might also be--quite mistakenly--making too much about certain clauses in the treaty containing language like "binding," even though there is no real domestic legal force to such language.  Once again, I don't believe any of these things are reasonable, and, as a disabled person, I'm offended by the outcome.  The treaty offered the U.S. the opportunity to stand up for disabled people around the world in the face of discrimination where there were no threats to American legal sovereignty at all.  The message to the world is: "we'll take care of our own disabled people, and if you're a disabled person in the rest of the world, good luck."  I think that's really cr*p.  But I don't really think the opposition to it is motivated by anything personal, and I don't think the ideology that led to the opposition is representative of the GOP's views as a whole.    

[anvi]

I certainly agree that the outcome is inimical to the interests of disabled people around the world, and that's what bothers me most about this.  I don't, however, think the Senators that opposed believe that they were doing so on the basis of something trivial.  I think their whole conception of national sovereignty was somehow at stake in the matter.  That said, I would argue that their conception of what national sovereignty is is quite shallow--it's more concerned with how we look rather than what we actually do.  But it's pretty easy to get politically whaled on in the public eye for opposing an international treaty defending the rights of the disabled, so I don't think politicians would be motivated to to it over what they themselves believed to be a triviality.

[anvi]

Once again, I'm not impugning his motives..  But Santorum's piece offers characterizations that are both self-contradictory and false. 

He claims on the one hand that the treaty would have sufficient power once ratified to enable the UN to dictate outcomes for disabled American children as opposed to elected representatives and parents.  But a few short paragraphs later, he claims that the treaty is not powerful enough to force other governments to implement legal protections.  With regard to its binding nature on domestic law, the same treaty can't be both powerful enough to overcome U.S. statute law and not nearly powerful enough to obligate statutory recognition in other countries.  In fact, the treaty gives every nation in the UN the option to reject the recommendations that the Enable committees might make if complaints were brought to it, so it dilutes no one's sovereignty, not that of individual states and hardly that of parents. 

There is also a conflation of the treaty's language regarding its provisions being in the best interests of the child with an attempt to override the parents' wishes; the treaty is about preventing institutional discrimination against disabled children, not taking away parents' choices about a child's education.   As long as equal educational opportunities are available for children, the parents are free to choose whatever they wish regarding their schools, and if parents found that some school district did not offer equal educational opportunities for their child, the treaty would back them up, not impede them.

Next, Santorum praises the provisions of the ADA but opposes the Enable treaty's provisions, despite the fact that the latter pretty much did serve as the model for the former, it seems on the sole basis of the specific clause about parents in the ADA.  If that's what's really at the heart of this, which I suspect is the case for Santorum, then why not make ratification of the treaty dependent on attaching a reservation with the desired language inserted? 
 

[anvi]

...but I have yet to hear one thing this treaty would have actually done other than let the countries that sign up to it feel good about themselves.  The UN could accomplish the same thing without the useless bureaucrats by passing a declaration.  Oh wait, they already did back in 1975 when the UN adopted its Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons.

Declarations are only statements of value.  This treaty creates an investigative committee to which complaints can be brought.  As I've noted several times, it's true that the recommendations of this proposed committee are not enforceable.  But there is still some value in bringing cases of institutional discrimination against disabled persons into the open light of day for attention and scrutiny, because it puts public pressure on such institutions and the countries in which they exist.  Institutional discrimination can persist far more easily when no one is looking, and when there are not sufficient numbers of eyes looking in individual countries, having a UN committee to turn to may be very important for those who find themselves victims of otherwise unscrutinized inequitable treatment.  It at least helps people a lot more than just sitting around and railing about "useless bureaucrats."  But, we didn't ratify the treaty, so it's all moot anyway, isn't it?  I, for one, have to quit looking at this thread now -- it's a real bummer.  

EDIT: I can't help but add one note.  Santorum's idea of attaching human rights conditions to bilateral treaties is problematic at best.  Lots of bilateral investment treaties have actually featured the elision of human rights concerns at the behest of the investor.  And even when attachment of human rights stipulations in bilateral treaties can be effective, that effectiveness usually ensues from both parties to the treaty having already well-developed institutional commitments to the rights in question.  The best insurance that human rights stipulations can be more effective in a bilateral treaty is if both parties are signatories to an international convention.  Passing up that opportunity by failing to ratify this convention, in actual practice, reduces rather than enhances our ability to influence other countries with regard to discrimination against the disabled. 

This outcome was really just wrong.  It's quite frustrating. 

[anvi]

America doesn't suck.
But the reasoning that led to this rejection does.
We certainly don't hate disabled people in other countries.  
We just don't particularly care about them.
After all, opting out of being on a committee to hear about their plight is a really effective way to wield our influence.  

[anvi]

Maybe they should follow our lead, anvi?

They are following our lead.  The provisions of the treaty are modeled on the Americans with Disabilities Act.  But when we're asked to do nothing more than have a rep on the Convention Committee the treaty proposes to hear and adjudicate cases of discrimination on an international body, we concoct a bunch of abjectly bulls*t reasons, and that's exactly what they are, bulls*t, just so we can give a big vain fat middle finger to the UN.  That's not leadership.  That's just us acting like a bunch of rutting asses, claiming to be models of human rights while overtly blowing off disabled people around the world.  This isn't a partisan point.  Ask Bush 41, ask Bob Dole, ask John McCain, ask George W. Bush, who instructed his UN ambassador to be a signatory to the thing when it was first proposed.

This outcome is really bogus.  Totally f*#king bogus   That is all.