Originally published on the CGS blog on November 28, 2014.
On July 26, 1990, former President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA was a groundbreaking document underscoring the need for a standard of treatment for Americans with physical and mental disabilities. In his address to the nation at its signing, Bush declared,
This historic act is the world’s first comprehensive declaration of equality for people with disabilities. The first. And its passage has made the United States the international leader on this human rights issue.
And he was right: the US had taken a leadership role on this issue. It was something to be proud of and served as a first step in bringing these same protections to peoples around the world.
As delegations came together to draft the Disability Treaty, officially known as Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), there was great hope that US leadership would extend to this new convention. This was not an unreasonable expectation, as the US was involved in the drafting of the treaty under President George W. Bush, and in 2007 entered a yes vote on the floor of the UN General Assembly. Yet we ultimately fell short, failing to ratify a convention we helped create.
This was a great disappointment to the convention’s creators as they had hoped the US could be depended upon to be a leader in advancing the mission of the Disability Treaty. According to Jake LaRaus’ The Birth of a ‘Big Lie’, the treaty “exports US leadership on disability rights, non-discrimination, and equality.” He argues that,
Becoming a state party to the agreement [would] not only show our faith in it and the virtues it espouses, but also [would] convince the other state parties that we are as committed to international disability rights as they are, if not more so.
In stepping away from this convention and refusing to pass its ratification through the Senate, the US is essentially telling the international community that global disability rights are not of concern to us.
Do we still want to lead?
There are lingering questions in all of this, and they are less about the about the Disability Treaty specifically and more broadly about the US struggle to determine how and when we support international treaties. The dissonance in our government on issues related to international involvement is palpable. Once a leader in human rights, it is now often hard to decipher whether we support such rights for those outside our borders at all. Many proponents find themselves yearning for a time when we stood on the front lines of these fights.
On April 25, 1945, delegations from around the world converged in San Francisco to discuss the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On the heels of the establishment of the United Nations itself, this committee set out on a bold mission to create a document as powerful as the Declaration of the Rights of Man, spawned out of the French Revolution. Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the UDHR Drafting Committee, hoped that this new universal declaration would “become the international magna carte of all men, everywhere.”
Where we will continue to struggle is in the fundamental disagreement amongst our political parties about the need for global governance, particularly that which is not directly led by the United States. We have in the US two very disparate ideologies, juxtaposed on any decision relating to UN treaties–ultimately the United Nations as a whole, if we are being completely honest. When one side of your political spectrum at its core sees no cause for involvement in the United Nations, on what level must you appeal to them in order to move toward ratification in the Senate? For if the right-leaning members of the Senate cannot be convinced of cosmopolitan ideals, which serve as the basis of such treaties, where must the conversation be directed? How can we talk about this sort of global involvement in an effective manner with a population whose ideology is in conflict with it from the start?
This is the question that must be answered. This is the answer that will open the door to the passage of UN treaties through the US Senate. This is how we step back into the foundation of the United Nations when the US was proud of its leadership role, and saw it as a bold and important responsibility.
