The US did sign and help to draft it, but to ratify you need a 2/3rd majority in the Senate. And the conservatives in Congress want domestic control over all law making and enforcement.
This could be an international treaty against punching kittens, and they would still vote no.
Edit: It’s also worth adding that a) this (like US law) has carve outs that allow kids to work under certain conditions, and b) this isn’t a labor specific treaty. This covers corporal, punishment, criminal punishment, education, gender, and sexuality, healthcare and a number of other things that are hot button issues for American conservatives.
Also, after this was drafted, the US has ratified international agreements on child labor.
Saying this is just a labor thing isn’t the full story at all.
This could be an international treaty against punching kittens, and they would still vote no.
Plus McConnell would never ratify a treaty that outlaws his favorite pastime.
The kittens are under anesthesia when they’re being punched. It’s very humane.
For similar reasons the Tories in the UK want to throw away the current Human Rights Act.
You know, just in case it has too many rights, and they want to remove some later.
Don’t forget child brides. They’re still legal in many states of the US of A.
It has been claimed that American opposition to the convention stems primarily from political and religious conservatives.
Shocking.
Don’t forget, our capitalists have been hard at work infecting the rest of the world with OUR greed disease. We’re the ones advocating other nations stop seeing their people as valued citizens and instead as capital livestock to be exploited mercilessly.
Child labor exists elsewhere out of desperate, struggling developing economies. We’re worse imho, because we’re doing it amid record profits, because its never enough, and our gluttonous pig oligarch owners ever demanding mooooaaaaaar, exploiting these kids whose schools they’ve already destroyed and stole the funding of through tax evasion and legislative tax policy capture.
We aren’t human to them, we’re capital livestock, which just makes our non-wealthy children capital veal.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/20/republican-child-labor-law-death
IMHO, the root of the issue is that the GOP has been dogmatically opposed to international law for decades now. They don’t like having to answer to anyone other than themselves. And you need 2/3rd of the senate to ratify.
It’s more than that, because Republican governors have been actively trying and succeeding in rolling back hard won child labor protection laws.
It’s not just about not having the foreigns telling them what to do, it’s because Republicans want children providing cheap labor to boost their stock portfolio. Here. Now.
Labor is only one of a multitude of things that this treaty addresses. Conservatives have been objecting to issues of sovereignty around its language on education, corporal punishment, criminal punishment, healthcare, sex and gender discrimination, etc.
It’s also worth noting that this treaty has carveouts to allow certain forms of child labor. Moreover, the US was able to ratify ILO 182 to agree to ban the worst forms of child labor.
I’m not saying child labor might not be a motivator for some of then conservatives opposed to ratifying this treaty, but there is a LOT more in there that US conservatives hate to relinquish control over, and when treaties are just focused on labor law, they have been easier to ratify.
This is more complex than just labor. The labor argument a fraction of the full story.
What children are being forced to work in dangerous places? Or missing school to do so? Is there a bunch of 4th graders missing school to go into the mines?
They’re literally getting dragged into machinery and killed on the job right now. Yes. Granted. They’re undocumented immigrants currently. So we’re not supposed to care about those. Inevitably though they will move on from abusing just those children.
Honestly anyone who would ask “where were they born” when considering whether to care about children getting hurt or killed is an unredeemable monster.
I absolutely 100% agree. Unfortunately, that’s the type of person most Americans seem to worship.
And emulate.
Yeah 😔
you should go check out half of congress. they seriously care about where you were born. for some reason. hell, they chose to let poor kids starve and they know they were born here.
They have children doing tobacco farming. Tobacco. Farming. 'nuff said right there. This country is trash.
American opposition to the convention stems primarily from political and religious conservatives. For example, The Heritage Foundation considers that “a civil society in which moral authority is exercised by religious congregations, family, and other private associations is fundamental to the American order”
No surprise there
The US barely ever ratifies treaties that require international oversight. It’s the same reason we have the UCMJ and not the Hague court.
Because America believes it’s an exception and above everyone else.
More like the US would rather keep its territorial integrity. They have the ability to deal with violations in house, no need to have international boards be used against us.
They have the ability to deal with violations in house
riiiiiiight, no bias at all in that. Hey, we investigated ourselves and found we are not liable to war crimes we commit abroad. how bloody fucking convenient.
Good job at giving Russia an excuse to be free of consequences when it finally loses in Ukraine. They’re probably going to make a case that they don’t need to have international boards be used against them too, no?
How would an international court be any less biased than a US court? Politics is politics just abiut everywhere.
You can’t expect any country to take the international court seriously if you don’t do it yourself. The logic that you’ve just used is exactly the kind of logic that countries would use that don’t want to be held accountable for their actions that go against international law.
These high-minded treaties don’t actually mean anything - there’s no enforcement mechanism and countries with a much worse human-rights record than the USA have signed them without consequences. IMO it’s better not to sign them than it is to pretend that signing does any good and lend unearned legitimacy to those other countries.
The treaty itself does not have any enforcement mechanism; however the US does. US courts recognize ratified treaties as having equal weight to laws passed the normal way Ratifying the Treaty would immediately make it federal law. The US has a robust enough legal system that the courts would the (over years of building up case law) determine exactly what that means.
This.
A treaty is a three step process. Draft, sign, ratify. This made it to step two, not step three for the US.
This perception arises from the fact that people think signing and ratifying are the same thing. They are not.
A treaty needs to be ratified to be legally binding, and ratification takes 2/3rd of the senate to OK it.
The executive branch signs international shit all the time, but they can’t get it through Congress. Which is why recent treaties lack teeth.
Ah yes the oft-used American Exceptionalist attitude of “we’re too good to bind ourselves to treaties like this”.
Tale as old as time. It’s why the US isn’t a member of the ICJ and many other international treaties. King’s don’t follow rules - they make them!
The US is a member of the International Court of Justice - every country in the United Nations is. Are you thinking of the International Criminal Court?
Other than that, my answer is “yes but that’s not a bad thing”.
Why is it a good thing?
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The actions of an international court will inevitably be political.
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The countries that are the worst human rights violators will never voluntary accept the authority of the court.
In that context, why should the USA give other, potentially hostile countries power over itself? It might have been worthwhile if it meant everyone had to follow the rules but in practice it would just give countries opposed to US foreign policy a tool for interfering without giving the US anything useful.
(My general view is that the US has made many very harmful mistakes but the era of American hegemony has still been one of remarkable global peace and prosperity. Like democracy, it’s the worst system except for everything else that has been tried. Now we’re seeing serious challenges to this hegemony and if they succeed, the world will get worse for almost everyone, not just for Americans. So if you think the US does more harm than good, we’re unlikely to come to an agreement.)
Edit: accidentally deleted, reposting.
The problem is that we need to for many reasons transition to an international order of democratic cooperation instead of economic and military domination. And if the US can never accept this kind of shared and cooperative approach foreign policy of everyone is going to be forever dragged towards this kind of zero sum bullshit we have at the moment. Even though it’s obvious that foreign policy doesn’t have to be zero sum.
Even if other countries are potentially less honest with their implementation of global treaties, even a relatively slow movement there and maybe a more thorough movement in the US makes everyone better off.
The only way to actually foster a cooperative relationship is to make yourself vulnerable, otherwise it’s just coercion and power not cooperation. And yes if you get hurt too much maybe you’ll have to leave again, but this pessimistic outlook from the get go is certainly never going to lead to the changes we obviously need.
How do we solve things that require global attentio and accountability, like climate change, with an increasingly hostile and isolationist country calling the shots on decisions about global economic matters.
Simply put if I want to live in a world somewhat resembling the current one in 60 years, American collapse or integration into global democracy is a necessity.
Also calling a country that has been at war for 80+% of it’s history a protector of global peace seems a bit questionable. Similarly I don’t think anyone can conclusively say that the US has done more or less harm than good. But by that same nebulous metric shouldn’t China hold that same title, as well as the Soviets, the British empire, the Spanish empire,the Romans ?
I would expect almost everyone to feel more ambiguously about the later list than the US, but both the US and empires of the past are exactly what they’ve always been, a tool for those inside, especially the ones in power to increase their quality of life, while everyone outside gets to be exploited, integrated, subjected to rules that do harm, and be attacked, regime changed and so on. It’s not actually the US that is a problem it’s the US being a modern empire that’s the problem.
That the US tries to be a liberal democracy doesn’t really lessen it’s status as an empire, especially if the powers at be largely prevent it’s people to decide against the status quo of domination.
Almost by necessity the most powerful are the most harmful if there are no systems to prevent their harm, diffuse their power etc.
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The actions of an international court will inevitably be political.
-
The countries that are the worst human rights violators will never voluntary accept the authority of the court.
In that context, why should the USA give other, potentially hostile countries power over itself? It might have been worthwhile if it meant everyone had to follow the rules but in practice it would just give countries opposed to US foreign policy a tool for interfering without giving the US anything useful.
(My general view is that the US has made many very harmful mistakes but the era of American hegemony has still been one of remarkable global peace and prosperity. Like democracy, it’s the worst system except for everything else that has been tried. Now we’re seeing serious challenges to this hegemony and if they succeed, the world will get worse for almost everyone, not just for Americans. So if you think the US does more harm than good, we’re unlikely to come to an agreement.)
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acab and the u.s. is the worlds police force for hire. it tracks.
freedom ferda!
USA! USA! USA!
Whatda phuk
