The threat from international law
Many good liberals regard the emergence and evolution of international law as a boon to humanity. They regard it as a kind of secular salvation. They think it will bring peace, justice, equality, and mutual understanding to the world. They want to use international law for so-called noble purposes: to promote human rights and protect the global environment, among many other do-gooder initiatives.
In reality, however, the spread and development of international law poses some real dangers. It poses a serious threat to free markets, state sovereignty, and individual liberty. To a great extent, it even threatens the democratic ideal itself.
International law does not conform to natural law. It does not aspire to a higher plane of complete impartiality and objectivity. International law does not transcend petty politics.
International law is politics. It is politics on a global, trans-national scale, with entrenched United Nations bureaucrats and diplomats each vying for their own very special interests.
United Nations officials are not directly accountable to the United States voter. U.N. President Koffi Annan is not accountable to the U.S. taxpayer. The American public cannot vote U.N. officials out of office.
This fundamental problem of direct democratic representation not only applies to the people of the United States; it also threatens the liberties and interests of voters and taxpayers everywhere. Why should individuals in other countries be forced to go along with United States and other foreign directives? State sovereignty and local self-government are usurped by international governmental organizations and the “laws” they force upon others, brazenly heedless of the consent of the governed.
The United States government was founded upon a glorious tradition of classic liberalism, with a constitution and a sacred Bill of Rights. The United States was inaugurated and baptized with liberty.
International law, by sharp contrast, has no such traditions. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, steeped as it is with Marxist tenets, is anything but the U.S. Bill of Rights. There are fundamental, principled constitutional restraints upon US law; international law has no such boundaries. It is a creature of international politics, not natural rights-based law.
In his book “The Law,” philosopher Frederic Bastiat defined the law as nothing more than the “collective organization of the individual right to self-defense.” International law is anything but “the collective organization of the individual right to self-defense.” It is concerned with such things as the
“International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights” of 1966. It is concerned with predatory rights–the dubious right to take from one group of people to give to another.
It is bad enough that we already have to deal with this threat from our domestic governments. The evolution of international law, however, only compounds the problem of safeguarding our individual liberties on a global scale.
