When the UN was established in 1945, with awesome hope and overwhelming good will, no one predicted it would become an agency that would probe and penetrate into the private and domestic lives of individuals residing in its member countries. This, however, is exactly what the UN is attempting to do. It is trying to introduce value systems, policies and practices that are alien to many, if not most, countries and which are very harmful, especially to women and girls and to their societies, in regard to abortion, homosexuality, sexual education and prostitution.
In short, the officials operating the UN are pushing for power to transform the world in accordance with their own personal belief systems. They are attempting to accomplish this by two methods:
1.Treaty Monitoring Committees
The UN human rights treaties include a provision that ratifying states must submit an official report to the UN officials who monitor the treaties every four or five years (depending on the treaty) in order to indicate whether the country has complied with the treaty provisions.
These treaty-monitoring committees are attempting to change the world to fit their own anti-life/anti-family ideologies by re-interpreting the treaties by way of “reading in” provisions that are not written in the actual text. For example, although the word “abortion” or access to sexual education and contraceptives or homosexuality are not a part of any treaty entered into within the UN system, the monitoring committees have “read in” these provisions and have repeatedly directed reporting states to implement these new-found provisions in their domestic law.
Monitoring Committee for the Women’s Convention
One of the worst offenders is the monitoring committee for the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Although abortion is not mentioned in the CEDAW document, that committee has recommended that abortion be instituted in 37 different countries. The committee especially directs its attention to Catholic countries, such as Ireland, Malta, Poland, Peru, etc., criticizing them for their failure to provide open access to abortion.
This criticism, although not legally binding on countries, has been effective, unfortunately, in inducing some countries to change their abortion law. This occurred most recently in the Catholic country of Colombia, where its laws prohibited all abortions. A U.S. based feminist group, The Center for Reproductive Rights, located in New York, with tentacles worldwide, commenced a constitutional legal challenge of the abortion law in Colombia. The Attorney General of Colombia was extremely deferential to the criticisms by the CEDAW monitoring committee in his brief to the court, quoting from the committee that it “noted with concern the existence of legislation criminalizing all abortions which would lead women to undergo high risk abortions”. The Attorney General also quoted from the monitoring committee when it stated that criminalizing abortion “constitutes a violation of a women’s right to equality since it violates a woman’s rights to health and life”. In its judgement, handed down on May 10, 2006, the Constitutional Court of Colombia quoted from the Attorney General’s deferential assessment of the monitoring committee’s recommendations, and even though they were merely ideological, and not based on the text of the treaty, relied on them in reaching its conclusions.
The result of this was that the Colombian court legalized abortion in cases of forced pregnancy, fetal malformation and endangerment of the life of the mother – a remarkable amendment to the abortion law, which will undoubtedly be widened further over the next few years.
Further examples of absurd recommendations of the CEDAW monitoring committee include directing China to legalize prostitution; directing Kyrgystan to legalize lesbianism; directing Belarus to cancel Mother’s Day because it “perpetuates” a negative cultural stereotype. It also criticized Ireland for allowing the Catholic Church too great a voice in public policy!
The monitoring committee for CEDAW’s “sister” treaty, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, has also had a field day re-interpreting its provisions and running amok over parental rights by extending new rights to minor children. For example, Canada has been criticized a number of times by this committee for its failure to ban the spanking of children. This, despite the fact that the Supreme Court of Canada has upheld the rights of parents to spank their children if it is reasonable under the circumstances as set out in S. 43 of the Criminal Code. Also, all polls clearly indicate by a wide margin that Canadians believe parents should have this reasonable right to discipline their children. Who are these so-called “experts,” frequently drawn from such bastions of human rights as Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China, to tell us what are acceptable practices for raising our children?
How the Monitoring Committees Acquired Influence
The influence of these treaty monitoring committees arose from a secret arrangement, made in December 1996, at Deep Cove, New York, between the heads of UN agencies and feminist NGOs at the UN. At this meeting, it was decided that monitoring committees would “re-interpret” all UN treaties so as to read into them feminist, anti-family provisions that were never written into these treaties in the first place. The document created at this meeting is called, “Round Table of Human Rights Treaty Bodies on Human Rights Approaches to Women’s Health, with a Focus on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights.” At this meeting, the committees were also instructed to send out “special rapporteurs” (reporters) to cross the borders into countries which had ratified the treaties in order to investigate, personally, whether compliance with the committees’ interpretation of the treaties was actually taking place.
This charade is due to the fact that most UN treaties came into existence and were ratified years ago, well before the western powers’ feminist, anti-life agenda had coalesced at the UN. As a result, the treaties do not include feminist provisions so the committees are now re-interpreting the treaties to incorporate such objectives.
In September 2006, Dr. Kristina Morvai of Hungary, who has been a member of the CEDAW monitoring committee since 2002, spoke out publicly against the questionable tactics used by the CEDAW monitoring committee. She pointed out that the State Parties to CEDAW never gave authority to the committee to declare or create rights through its own interpretations of the treaty. She also confirmed that the committee is legislating in fields that are not covered by the Convention and that there are large inconsistencies, incoherency and unpredictability in the treaty monitoring committees’ positions. Dr. Morvai’s outspoken objections to the activities of the monitoring committee led to her removal from the committee.
The treaty monitoring committees, whose recommendations are non-binding and advisory only, have become so discredited that Australia, in September 2000, decided that it would no longer report to UN committees because they consistently overstep their mandates. Canada should follow Australia’s example.
The Effect of UN Recommendations and Reports
Although the recommendations by the UN treaty monitoring committees and the rapporteurs are not binding or enforceable in law, they nonetheless serve as a useful tool for feminist NGOs to pressure and embarrass governments into implementing their recommendations. In Canada, in the December and January hearings (see Reality March/April, 2007) the criticism by the treaty monitoring committee was used time and time again in the testimony before the Status of Women Standing Committee as indication that the Conservative government was “anti-women” and was denying Canadian women their equality rights” by its cut back to that agency’s funding.
The Canadian Courts and UN Treaties
A further concern is that the Supreme Court of Canada has recently begun to look to UN treaties for direction in interpreting human rights in Canada, even though such legislation has not been passed under Canadian law.
That is, in order for international treaties to be enforced in Canada, they must first be enacted into domestic legislation. However, feminist Supreme Court Judge, Madame Justice Claire L’Heureux Dubé, in the 1999 case, Law vs. Minister of Immigration, got around this lack of domestic enactment by simply proclaiming that “the values and principles reflected in international human right laws assist in interpreting [Canadian] statutes…”.
Again, in the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Canadian Foundation for Children v. Attorney General of Canada (the spanking case), in which REAL Women intervened, the applicant (the Foundation which opposed spanking) used the UN treaties and the “interpretation” of them by the monitoring committee as an indication that spanking children was “unreasonable” and supposedly counter to international law. Fortunately, however, in that case, the Supreme Court of Canada chose to ignore the treaty monitoring committee’s interpretation and looked instead to the actual wording of the treaty itself and found that it did not explicitly ban the spanking of children. Next time we might not be so lucky.
2.UN Rapporteur (Reporters)
The United Nations has another method to try to change the values of its member nations. It has now developed the practice of retaining rapporteurs (reporters) who are supposed to be experts, selected to provide recommendations to various UN agencies and committees. An example of this was the appointment of an American so-called expert, Paul Hunt, to the Geneva based UN Human Rights Commission. In 2004, Mr. Hunt submitted a report that stated that sexual and reproductive health was an integral element of mental and physical health, and, therefore, nations had an obligation to provide abortion. He further stated, “Women with unwanted pregnancies should be offered reliable information and compassionate counselling, including information on where and when a pregnancy may be terminated legally”. Mr. Hunt also stated, “As has been noted, discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is impermissible under international human rights law”.
These comments infuriated the delegates at the conference because they were deliberate misstatements. Fortunately, because of the diligent work of the pro-family NGOs and delegations, including REAL Women’s representative there, Ginger Malacko , some of the more harmful statements in Mr. Hunt’s report were watered down.
Nonetheless, a draft resolution was proposed by Brazil to “welcome” Hunt’s Report. After extensive lobbying, this resolution was downgraded to state that Mr. Hunt’s report “would be taken note of.” This greatly downgraded Mr. Hunt’s egregious report.
A more recent example of an unacceptable United Nations report is the 148-page report released in January 2007 by the Executive Director of UNICEF, Anne Veneman, who reported on “The State of the World’s Children 2007”. In fact, her report focused instead on the supposed discrimination and disempowerment of women. One sidebar sets out the “deleterious consequences” of gender discrimination across the life cycle. Gender inequality, according to the report, is “precarious”. The report did manage finally to tie in children by stating that the achievement of gender equality makes the “world fit for children”.
In its reference to violent homes, the UNICEF Report indicated only that the perpetrators of violence could be “parents or other close family members”. The careful wording about “violent homes” and “domestic settings” totally ignored the problems that result from family breakdown and skates over the fact that fathers are not the primary abusers of their children. Of course, in this politically correct, gobbledygook document, children’s vulnerability necessitates the “primary responsibility” of the “state” to “uphold children’s rights to protection and access to services”.
This UNICEF report is, in reality, all about a left wing “women’s agenda,” albeit, papered over with slogans such as “a world fit for women is a world fit for children”.
Another example of UN tampering is the report issued by the Secretary General’s appointed “expert”, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, presented to the UN’s General Assembly on October 11 and 12, 2006. This report is entitled “Report on Violence Against Children” and drew on a previous United Nations report, “Global Summary of the Legal Status of Corporal Punishment of Children.” Mr. Pinheiro’s report recommended the prohibition “of all forms of violence, including corporal punishment against children.” It also recommended that the public, including children should be educated on children’s rights, and that children should participate in the development of national strategies, including making “child-friendly” reporting mechanisms. A brave new world it will be if his recommendations are ever implemented.
Conclusion
Canadians should follow the example set by Australia and cease to make their reports to treaty monitoring committees until such time as the committees stop making recommendations on ideological grounds, contrary to the actual text of the treaties.
The Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations John McNee, a professional diplomat and former Canadian Ambassador to Belgium, should be required to raise this matter of the abuse by the treaty monitoring committees with the new United Nations Secretary-General, Ban-Ki Moon.
Please write to Prime Minister Harper and Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter McKay and your MP to bring to their attention the manipulation by these treaty monitoring committees led by feminist so-called “experts.” Request that Canada no longer undergo the expense and time consuming effort of submitting reports to them. We know that Canadian feminist NGOs will be submitting their “shadow” reports to the CEDAW committee at the same time Canada makes its next official report in 2007, providing the committee with ammunition to criticize the Conservative government for its alleged anti-women policies. That is how these committees operate: they rely on feminist NGOs from member States to provide the information necessary to attack the governments of their country for not implementing feminist ideology into their domestic legislation. We do not need such nonsense.
Please write to:
The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A2
Fax: 613-941-6900
The Honourable Peter McKay
Minister of Foreign Affairs Canada
125 Sussex Drive
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0C2
Fax: 613–996-9709 |
