One day after
President Barack Obama won re-election, his Administration agreed to a
new round of international negotiations to revive a United
Nations-sponsored treaty regulating the international sale of conventional
arms, which critics fear could affect the Constitutionally protected right of
U.S. citizens to purchase and bear firearms.
Now, in the
wake of the Newtown school massacre and the President’s January 16 promise to
“put everything I’ve got” into a sweeping new series of gun control initiatives,
the fate of that treaty, which enters a “final” round of negotiations this
March, may loom as more important than ever, according to critics, some of whom
argue that the U.S. should never have entered the talks in the first place.
Their concerns
remain, despite the fact that President Obama repeated his support for the
Second Amendment and “our strong tradition of gun ownership and the rights of
hunters and sportsmen” on January 16. (The subject never came up in his second
inaugural address.)
U.S. diplomats have declined a Fox News request to discuss, among other things, the direction of the talks, and whether the other 192 countries involved respect that U.S. “red lines” in the negotiations—including the Administration’s assertion that “the Second Amendment to the Constitution must be upheld”—are truly inviolate.
The
Administration first agreed to take part in the U.N. arms treaty negotiations
in 2009—the same year in which it launched the now-notorious Fast and Furious
operation, which provided weapons to illicit gun traders, ostensibly to track
gun-running operations to Mexican drug cartels. Those negotiations proceeded
irregularly, but seemed to founder last July.
But then, the
U.S. joined a 157-0 vote, with 18 abstentions, of a U.N. General Assembly disarmament
committee, on November 7, 2012, —the day after President Barack Obama won his
second-term victory--to create the March round of talks. (A State Department
official insisted to Fox News that the vote only came after the U.S. elections
due to the disruption caused by Hurricane Sandy; otherwise, it would have taken
place earlier.)
Amid the fog
surrounding the treaty process, however, one thing seemed clear: an issue that
deeply involves American rights and freedoms is back on the table, linked to
the lingering problem of how to keep conventional military weapons out of the
hands of terrorists and extremists. The State Department itself, on a web page that also lists its “red line” reservations
in the negotiations
,
calls it a “complex but critical issue.”
For many
critics, however, the draft version of the treaty is also a mine field of
clauses and propositions that mandate a much greater federal role in U.S. gun
sales, and potentially tie the U.S. to the gun control agenda of other
governments or regimes.
“The treaty is
drafted as if every nation in the world has centralized control of the arms
industry and arms sales, which is not the case here,” said Ted Bromund, a
security policy expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation who has followed
the arms trade treaty process closely, and who believes the U.S. should
bail out of the March treaty talks.
“We’ve already
got an enormous body of statutes and practice on the import, manufacture and
export of firearms, the most elaborate in the world,” Bromund told Fox
News. “How would we use a treaty that gives enormous discretion to the
Administration on the import and export of arms? Essentially, it would give the
Administration much more control than it already has.”
Moreover, the
treaty is unlikely to change any behavior on the part of lawbreaking regimes
and dictatorships around the world whose handing on of weapons to terrorists or
criminal enterprises is supposedly one of the activities the treaty will
curb.
On the surface,
the treaty, which aims to regulate the sale and resale of weapons ranging from
tanks to missiles to rifles and pistols, is aimed at creating a more manageable
environment for the international arms trade.
The
multi-billion-dollar market in illicit weapons sales, according to a report by
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, leads to “armed violence, conflict
and civil unrest involving violations of international law, abuses of the
rights of children, civilian casualties, humanitarian crises and missed social
and economic opportunities.”
Critics of the
treaty effort, however, see something equally bad: a nebulous
international agreement that does nothing to improve U.S. security but opens
the way to “damage by a thousand cuts,” as one critic put it, to the U.S.
civilian right to bear arms and also to American foreign policy interests, no
matter what the State Department may currently say about defending both.
For one thing,
notes Bromund, most nations negotiating the treaty—which include Russia, China
and Iran—“do not recognize the human right of self-defense” against tyrannical
or murderous regimes—the essential basis of the Second Amendment.
Instead, a
draft version of the treaty prepared in advance of the November vote emphasizes
the “the inherent right of all States to individual or collective
self-defense,” and leaves it up to individual nation states themselves to
police such issues as whether their arms sales will “be used to commit or
facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”
Whether some of
the world’s worst human rights violators, who are also arms exporters to even
more murderous regimes, would spend much time worrying about such niceties,
Bromund indicated, is unlikely.
“All these
other nations are free to improve their export policies without any kind of
treaty at all,” Bromund argues. “They choose not to. What does that tell you
about their intentions?
“It is
profoundly unlikely to restrain really bad actors, or make the less bad
improve. It is basically pernicious. Relying on a treaty to stop irresponsible
nations from acting irresponsibly is about as sensible as seeking to solve the
problem of crime by outlawing it.
If the arms
trade treaty could work, it would not be necessary.”
Moreover,
critics point out that the draft version of the treaty contains a number of
provisions that would make a bad situation from the U.S. point of view even
worse. Among them:
--various
clauses in the treaty mandate domestic gun control as part of an ostensibly
international obligation to end illegal “end use,” creating the
possibility of a broad expansion of national regulatory powers.
--terms such as
the “transfer” of arms under the treaty are undefined, again leading the
possibility of broad regulatory expansion—and not merely to adhere to the arms
treaty. According to one clause, for example, signatories “shall not authorize
any transfer of conventional arms within the scope of this Treaty if the
transfer would violate its relevant international obligations, under
international agreements to which it is a Party”—a clearly open-ended
commitment.
--another
clause bans the transfer of arms to “facilitate” among other things “crimes
against humanity”—a phrase now often used, in the highly-charged U.N.
environment, for allegations against Israel. The same vagueness applies to
terms like “serious violations to international humanitarian law”—a fuzzy body
of assertions that no single nation may endorse.
--as currently
written, the treaty allows its subsequent amendment by a majority of the
original parties, meaning that the U.S. could later find it was bound by
provisions it had not agreed to.
A more subtle
flaw, notes Bromund, is that any badly designed treaty that the U.S. agrees to
at the negotiations, and that the President signs, can have an effect on U.S.
laws and regulations even though it would still need to be ratified by the
Senate, which must approve international agreements by a two-thirds majority.
The reason:
once a treaty is signed, the parties must respect its “object and
purpose” even before ratification—or if ratification does not occur—which
is “completely in the eye of the beholder,” Bromund says.
Case in point:
the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, which was signed by
President Bill Clinton but never ratified by the U.S. Senate. Nonetheless, the
U.S. participates in Kyoto Protocol meetings, observes greenhouse gas limits of
its own, and operates as if conforming U.S. legislation may pass in the future.
Thus even
agreements that are not ratified by the U.S. can become what Bromund calls
“zombie treaties” – feeding on internal issues that radically
define and distort U.S. political and regulatory behavior for decades.
John Bolton, a
former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and Fox News contributor, notes that the
already controversial treaty could get worse, from a U.S. point of view, before
it reaches its final form in March. “My experience is that a lot of the worst
provisions in these agreements come in at the last minute,” Bolton says.
He added: “It’s unbelievable that the issue is still kicking
around.”
In 2001, as
U.S. assistant secretary of state for arms control and international security
during the first George W. Bush Administration, Bolton voiced similar concerns
about aspects of an earlier U.N. effort to install a “Program of Action to
Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons
in All Its Aspects.”
The Program of
Action is far foggier than the proposed new treaty. Among other things, it
advocates “mobilizing the political will throughout the international community
to prevent and combat illicit transfers and manufacturing of small arms and
light weapons in all their aspects,” and to “raise awareness of the
character and seriousness of the interrelated problems associated with the
illicit manufacturing of and trafficking in these weapons.”
In other words,
it promotes lobbying and advocacy, often by non-governmental organizations with
political agendas of their own, on behalf of the arms sales goals.
The Program of
Action, which followed a previous attempt to get a formal international arms
sale treaty passed in the 1990s, is still in existence, under the aegis of the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs
.
It holds periodic conferences and demands that adherents provide reports on
their progress toward Program goals.
For example,
Iran—which funnels arms to terrorist groups in Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere, as
well as to the Assad regime in Syria—noted this year that it in 2011 it had
created a “special judicial authority” to investigate and punish
violators of a new law “on the punishment or trafficking in arms and
ammunitions and possessors of illicit arms and ammunitions.” The
penalties under the law, and the nature of the new “judicial authority,” were
not outlined.
“Iran is well respected at the U.N.,” notes
Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the National Rifle Association (NRA), who
calls the radical Islamic republic a member in good standing of the “club of
governments” who pursue international gun control law for their own ends.
And most
of the killing of civilians in the developing world, he adds, “is done by
governments in that club.”
Source: FoxNews.com
by George Russell Published January 23, 2013 George
Russell is editor-at-large of Fox News
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