Archive Report
Archive Report
Status of U.N. Treaties in United States
American adherence to various United Nations covenants and conventions, projected with the intent of gaining wider respect for basic rights and fundamental freedoms, is threatened by a rising constitutional controversy in the United States. An important body of opinion holds that the U.N. multilateral treaties, if ratified by this country, would have the paradoxical effect of endangering full preservation in the United States of the civil liberties whose observance they are designed to promote in other countries. That danger is envisioned primarily in connection with the proposed covenant on human rights and a proposed convention on freedom of information, but the same legal principles are involved in the question of American adherence to the already negotiated genocide convention.