Freeland, Steven --- "Our Human Rights and the United Nations" [2003] HRightsDef 10; (2003) 12(2) Human Rights Defender 22

Our Human Rights and the United Nations

Steven Freeland

In the last edition of HRD, Steven Freeland argued the case for the International Criminal Court. In this edition Charles Francis examines the UN human rights treaties and the ICC from a very different perspective. For more information you can visit the website: www.endeavourforum.org.au.

Charles Francis AM RFD QC is a senior Victorian lawyer who has lectured extensively on human rights in the USA, England, New Zealand, Canada and in Australia. He appeared as defence counsel in 46 murder trials. In World War II he served as air-crew.

After the 1939-45 War, when the United Nations was established, most people looked to it with hope for the future. Primarily it was envisaged as a world authority, which would above all serve to prevent wars and act as a mediator and arbitrator when disputes developed between member nations. Secondly, as the gross violations of human rights by the Nazi regime became more fully known, the United Nations was seen also as a world body which would endeavour to establish and protect appropriate human rights. The human rights it then proposed to police were very different from many of those rights which it now seeks to enforce.

In 1948 it was not envisaged that the United Nations would become a world government, nor would it intrude into national sovereignty. The declarations then made by the United Nations had a strong underlying Christian ethos and thus a pro-family ethos. To some extent the drafters of the postwar declarations were using 20th century national constitutions as their models adding the protection of the family and the child to those political and civil democratic rights which they wished to identify and preserve. In pursuit of human rights the United Nations made a number of declarations of rights, which were, for the most part, unexceptionable at that time.

In the next 30 years a huge change came over the United Nations. It and its bureaucracies increasingly came to think of the United Nations as a world government, with power to override the sovereignty of individual nations. Many at the United Nations also came to see it as a body which would be used as an instrument of social engineering.

A number of radical groups in the Western Word realised their social agendas, which would never be passed by their own legislatures, might nevertheless be adopted in United Nations treaties on human rights. In all there are now six different human rights treaties. In fact already some parts of these radical agendas have been adopted in United Nations treaties on human rights. Perhaps the most striking examples are some of the radical women’s rights and child libertarian rights adopted in CEDAW and CROC respectively.

CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) provides for the modification of “social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women” and “the elimination of any stereotypical concept of the roles of men and women”. It paves the way, for example, for feminists to demand that women should be frontline soldiers in battle. This right, if insisted upon, will inevitably render our defence forces less efficient. Some of the stereotypical roles of men and women are, in fact, based on very sound reasons. Common sense also tells us that women captured in combat would, in many countries, be likely to be the subject of repeated rapes.

The provisions of CEDAW seek to overcome injustices towards women by mandating sweeping social changes that embody the narrow ideological opinions and social analysis of militant feminism on a spectrum of social issues. It is fundamentally flawed in its radical social analysis and totalitarian in its methods. Further it undermines the dignity of women by a devaluation of their irreplaceable role within the family and in society as mothers.

Wherever the entire emphasis is on women having careers, motherhood is denigrated and you have dying populations. This is precisely what is now happening in Western Europe.

Abortion is, as we know, a very divisive issue. Urged on by the feminist groups, those supporting CEDAW have more recently been promoting a policy of unrestricted abortion on demand even to the end of the ninth month of pregnancy, in total violation of the rights of the unborn child as once conferred by the original Declaration of Human Rights.

CROC (the Convention on the Rights of the Child) has a number of valuable Articles within it but unfortunately Articles 12 through to 16 create the concept of the autonomous child with rights it can readily enforce against the wishes of its parents depriving the parents of that effective control of the child, which is normally in the best interests both of the child and its family.

Once a country signs a treaty not only does it undertake to make the Articles of the treaty law in its own country, but it also undertakes to put itself under the surveillance and direction of the relevant United Nations Committee administering the treaty. Such Committees ordinarily consist of representatives many of whom come from countries whose governments are despotic or totalitarian, countries which have no understanding or tradition of democracy or human freedom. By way of example when the Province of Alberta refused to ratify CROC, as it was entitled to do under the Canadian Constitution, the relevant United Nations Committee criticised Canada for having a Federal system, and considered the Canadian Government had a duty to override provincial rights and demand that Alberta do as it was told.

United Nations Committees are often incredibly ill informed in relation to the law and customs of the countries they purport to direct. For example the CEDAW Committee demanded that property rights should be given to individual aboriginal women in respect of land under Native Title Rights. The Committee had no understanding that where such a right existed it was vested in the tribe as a whole, not in individual men and women.

Our ratification of some of the more recent United Nations conventions is now creating a situation in which Australia could be dominated by alien ideologies, ideologies which are the antithesis of the Australian love of freedom.

In what may be seen as a grave diminution of Australian human rights, we need to mention the International Criminal Court Statute, which Australia recently signed, although it was not signed without at least some public debate in the Australian arena.

Most Australians assumed that the ICC was set up as a Court simply to try war crimes and other gross violations of human rights. Those who asserted there were very real dangers to Australia in the setting up of this Court with its ill-defined and sweeping jurisdiction were confronted by an Attorney General’s Department and a Foreign Affairs Department which provided little intelligent answer to their argument. In general opponents of the Statute were met with personal abuse rather than rational debate.

Professor Richard Wilkins of Brigham Young University is not only a world renowned professor of international law, but also has a unique experience of the United Nations having represented the United States of America at United Nations Conferences on many occasions.

Richard Wilkins was kind enough to send a learned opinion on the ICC Statute to our Federal Government, and also made himself available to discuss its problems with some of our Federal members. His strong warning against the ratification of the Treaty was entirely disregarded. In the United States, however, the Treaty was very firmly rejected.

As the United Nations moves in the direction of being a world government, such government may only be attained with enormous personal cost to human rights, and with a loss of the many rights which should be enjoyed in every democracy.

A famous French philosopher once said that: “The idea begets the organisation; then the organisation kills the idea”. The recent history of the United Nations could well prove a painful example of that sad warning.