That sounds like a “yes”.
Kum Ing Soon or whatever the fuck his name is looks well fed, so food is apparently not a problem. What they seem to need is a barber and a tailor.
But we don’t have an unlimited moral obligation to try. Charity of any kind is not an absolute moral obligation that must be obeyed without regard to specific situations or consequences. In this specific situation, we have no moral obligation to provide food to North Korea, nor do we have any reason to believe it would do much good even if we did.
And blah, blah, blah. Do you really believe that all this nitpicking and hairsplitting does anything good for anyone anywhere? You have gotten very, very far away from the question of whether or not America is committing a human rights violation.
Actually, that sort of makes sense - tyrant rather than dictator. Though I bet he really would never call himself King, Emperor, Imperial Majesty.
I never really looked at it that way, the hereditary aspect. We never really covered Korea other than a bit about the war in school. And really, most Americans probably think of MASH when Korea is mentioned.
A 3 page thread about Jimmy Carter and human rights without a single mention of East Timor? You guys are slipping.
I was considering mentioning the multimillion dollar lawsuit for marketing his I/P book as non-fiction, but I decided not to.
That’s because someone else asked a different question. Take it up with them.
In what way does it sound like a yes?
[QUOTE=ruadh]
In what way does it sound like a yes?
[/QUOTE]
Your first sentence in post #120:
You even stress the “all” by placing it in italics.
The rest of your post was your objecting to my mention of the Wii (which was partially a hyperbole-joke on my part) as a reasonable part of a standard of living for North Koreans. I think you imply that only reasonable demands will be made or enforced.
Thing is, reasonable to whom? The CESCR is the body appointed to oversee (but probably not enforce on it’s own) compliance with the Covenant. The Convenant was ratified by 160 parties (with 6 signed but not ratified). The Optional Protocol (which grants oversight to the CESCR) was only signed by 35 (22%), and actually ratified by 3 (2%).
Why do you think that is? I suspect (sorry, no cite) that very few sovereign nations want an outside entity telling them that they are not doing enough to stamp out world hunger, or whatever.
For example, another part of the convenant states that it is a “human right” to work. (Article 6.) The US has had millions of people who cross the southern border illegally to find work. Should the US be forced by the UN to have “open borders” so that these folks can find work? Should the US government be required to provide transportation (buses, trains) from border towns to other locations within the country for these migrant laborers? Food? Medical care? Housing? Social security? Job training? All of these things are mentioned in the various different Articles of the Convenant as human rights.
More back on topic, the US believes that the government of North Korea may be diverting food shipments to a politically favored segment of it’s population, and not necessarilly the most needy. I feel that the US should be allowed to decide, with the food or money it itself dispenses, whether or not to continue to send the shipments under those conditions, and not some other outside entity.
That was a reply to your first question, on whether there were international obligations associated with these rights. The answer to that is yes. But it doesn’t follow from that that the answer to your second question is yes.
That “outside entity” can tell them that anyway. This has nothing to do with the Protocol. Any state that has ratified the Covenant - not the Optional Protocol - is obliged to submit periodic reports to the Committee on how it is complying with its obligations under the Covenant. The Committee then issues its observations on how it believes the state is complying. These are in the form of “concerns” and “recommendations”, but they still amount to - and are regarded as - criticisms that the state is not doing enough.
The main purpose of the Protocol is to establish a complaints mechanism so that an individual can haul up the state on a specific violation (or alleged violation). Even if states ratify that, though - and I wouldn’t assume that 2% to be a final number, incidentally, it was only opened for signature quite recently - there still aren’t any real enforcement mechanisms. Something like 116 states have ratified the companion Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and they still feel free to ignore decisions made by that treaty’s monitoring body.
So the issue isn’t about any state being forced to do something. It can’t be forced, it can only have its violations highlighted.
A lot of these things are mentioned in various state constitutions as human rights, too, and that doesn’t mean their courts can force the state to take all the specific steps you’ve listed. That was the point of my mentioning the right to a fair trial and the right to OJ’s defence team. It’s absolutely specious to suggest that just because a right is set out means that there is no limit to what a state is obliged, nationally or internationally, to do in furtherance of that right.
And you have every right to that view. Jimmy Carter likewise has every right to his view that the US is actually withholding food from starving people for political reasons. Given his own past, I suspect he knows how these things work in practice, irrespective of what the US says in public. When the US imposed sanctions on Iraq there was a very widespread view that that was a breach of the Iraqi people’s human rights. The embargo on Cuba has been very widely viewed as a breach of the Cuban people’s human rights. The facts underlying the North Korea issue may be in dispute but there is nothing extraordinary about the underlying principle of the view he has expressed.
Seeing how the CESCR’s suggested powers were only written in the OP, and its existence was created later by the ECOSOC, it’s somewhat of a stretch to claim that the original treaty itself specified its existence and reporting protocol. What the treaty actually says is is that nations must submit reports to the Secretary General, who will in turn pass them along to the Economic and Social Council, which will have the option to offer non-binding advice if it sees fit. The ECOSOC is not the same thing as the CESCR. In point of fact the ECOSOC created the CESCR unilaterally, and even then only created it to provide monitoring, not any sort of legally binding suggestions, let alone demands..And when it came time for the nations of the world to vote on whether or not the CESCR would have any legal relevance at all, a grand total of three nations actually ratified its existence as anything other than the body that the ECOSOC created to delegate opinion-writing.
In point of fact, the treaty also specifically says that absolutely nothing in it is to be taken as a demand that nations not enjoy their own resources and wealth. That means that the US is under no obligation to spend its wealth and resources on South Korea, even if you or Jimmy pretzel up an argument to rationalize such support.
We’ve been over this several times. “criticisms”, “concerns” and “[non-binding] recommendations” do not establish the content of international law, international custom or treaty law. They are irrelevant, although for obvious reasons you need them as a rationalization to prop up your argument. .
This actually undercuts your argument. If international custom is such that advisory bodies are seen as mere irritants, then not only do they have no force under international law and in this case under treaty law, but under international custom they also have no relevance. In fact, international custom would actively support disregarding their advice as both right and proper.
Somewhat like a treaty stating that people have the right to food and someone else stating that it’s really a right for them to continue demanding food aid from other nations, even if those nations no longer wish to provide such charitable contributions.
Given Jimmy Carter’s past, I’m surprised that he’s able to tie his own shoe laces in the morning. He’s shown a distinct willingness to distort, falsify or simply invent facts when it fits the narrative he’s trying to sell, and that’s assuming he’s not simply suffering from dementia. And as Carter’s administration hardly set protocol for the nation, his experiences were valid when dealing with what his administration did. That doesn’t grant him special insight into how Obama’s administration functions.
The sanctions against Iraq were UN sanctions, set in place at the highest level by the UNSC, not the US. They did have actual legal force and relevance on the global level.The US Iraqi Sanctions Regulations only applied to Americans.
FinnAgain beat me to the punch in replies, so I’ll limit my responses.
If an individual state can decide for themselves what steps to take in helping another nation with it’s human rights problems (food, in this case), then what is the point of having this watchdog commitee? If their reports are no more than opinion, and an individual nation is free to ignore it/them, then it’s existance is meaningless, isn’t it? The commitee’s opinion holds no more weight than my own.
Thus it seems we are in agreement that Carter is, at best, full of hot air.
It has been suggested by you in post #39 that human rights have been codified into various treaties such as the ICESCR. If the ICESCR doesn’t obligate the US to continue sending food in this circumstance (where food is being diverted), then why is this treaty being used to support the statement that the US is violating human rights?
A. Not once did I ever claim that the CESCR and Protocol were specified in the original treaty. Once again, please stop making up things that weren’t said.
B. Your chronology is off. The CESCR was established under a 1985 resolution by ECOSOC. The Optional Protocol was not written until 2008. It was, in fact, a draft proposal for an Optional Protocol written by the CESCR itself in 1997 that got the ball rolling.
FFS, nobody said it was.
It created it in order to devolve its monitoring functions to it. To repeat what I said previously: states parties to the Covenant are obliged to submit reports, which the CESCR will evaluate and report on; these are in the form of concerns and recommendations. No they aren’t legally binding, and I never said they were. But they do, nonetheless, carry considerable weight within the UN system. To quote from UN Fact Sheet 16 by the High Commissioner for Human Rights:
Of course, you’re free to believe that what the UNHCHR thinks is completely irrelevant too. But it is, again, only your opinion. Your opinion is not the gospel truth.
As I’ve already pointed out the Protocol only opened for signature fairly recently - September 2009 to be precise. That’s nothing in international law terms; it took almost ten years for the comparable ICCPR Protocol to get enough ratifications to enter into force. All three of the ratifications took place within the past year, and the most recent signature occurred only a couple weeks ago - it’s still very much a live process. Here in Ireland, for example, the government has confirmed that it is undergoing consultations as to whether to sign and ratify; it is quite reasonable to assume that the same thing is happening in other countries.
I assume you’re referring to Art 25, which states that nothing in the Covenant “shall be interpreted as impairing the inherent right of all peoples to enjoy and utilize fully and freely their natural wealth and resources”. This is intended to preserve the right of economic self-determination for indigenous groups and less powerful countries (which right, incidentally, the US and other developed countries have continually rejected in General Assembly resolutions, so they can hardly assert it for themselves through this text). It is not meant to say that the Covenant does not oblige the wealthy nations to assist those in need. In fact, Art 1.2 of the Covenant specifically deems the right of enjoyment of natural resources to be without prejudice to international obligations.
If you had actually bothered to read the post you would see that I brought them up in the context of mlees’s suggestion that states were refusing to ratify the Protocol because they didn’t want to receive any such criticisms. The point was to show that they are already receiving such criticisms, not to make any comment on their prescriptive power.
I don’t believe you can derive an international custom that the monitoring bodies’ views are there to be disregarded simply from the fact that states often do disregard them. For one thing, custom is based on a complex blend of states’ practice and their opinion as to the nature and extent of their obligations; and it can’t be assumed that simply because a state doesn’t comply with the view of the monitoring body means that it rejects outright the relevance of that view. Often states will try to justify their non-compliance by reference to some other obligation, or will take steps short of full compliance in order to compensate the complainant for the breach (which it can be argued amounts to de facto acceptance that an obligation was breached) or to bring themselves more in line with the body’s views. The manner in which states respond to decisions that they are in breach is so widely varied, it really is impossible to reach any clear conclusions about custom from it. It can only really be said that failure to ratify an Optional Protocol can not be linked, as mlees was suggesting, to a fear of being “forced” to implement those decisions. Which is equally the case for any international law agreement.
I agree that it doesn’t automatically flow from the Treaty’s guarantee of a right to food. That’s why I didn’t only quote from the Treaty.
Given your own ideology as expressed here and elsewhere, I’m not surprised you take that view.
Nope, it doesn’t. But it does give him a little more insight than a lot of other people would have into how much BS there is in US political leaders’ claims to be acting with benevolent intentions.
… of which the US is in many respects the driving force, and certainly was where sanctions against Iraq were concerned.
And they were nonetheless widely considered a human rights violation. The Security Council’s imprimatur doesn’t automatically render an act human rights-compliant.
mlees:
Is your opinion cited by national or international courts, or expressed by scholars or the UNHCHR or its experts as having any sort of persuasive authority? There’s your answer to that.
Because human rights treaties are meant to be normative, not just prescriptive.
This is really becoming a pathetic dodge. I mean, it was lame before, but this is just sad, I think that this is the third time you’ve called your own words “made up”. You stated that “Any state that has ratified the Covenant - not the Optional Protocol - is obliged to submit periodic reports to the Committee on how it is complying with its obligations under the Covenant.”
But there is no such obligation under the actual treaty. The obligation is to report to the Secretary General. No nation is obliged to do anything to the CESCR, at all. At the point where you’re claiming that a factual refutation of your claims is a lie because you don’t like being proven wrong again, it’s really beyond the pale. You can solve these problems by knowing what you’re talking about and being factually accurate, first. It’s obvious that you’re trying to cram a square peg into a round hole, and that really isn’t my fault. Speaking of which:
I’ll note here that you’re actually making things up. I didn’t include anything on chronology. I stated the facts, which are that the original treaty did not create the CESCR, the original treaty did not obligate anybody to report to or interact with the CESCR, and the OP only gave them any possible relevancy beyond being the body to whom non-binding-opinion-writing was delegated to after they were created, and the OP is not in force.
Again, these things wouldn’t happen if you had the facts straight before you make claims. You claimed that anybody at all was obligated to report to the CESCR. But nobody is. The only obligation is to report to the Sec Gen. The CESCR did not even exist when nations agreed to be obligated to submit reports to the Sec Gen. If it was dissolved tomorrow, their obligations would not change. The real problem is that you’ve invented a fictional “obligation” and are now protesting getting caught at it.
Stop that.
The goalpost shifting going on is truly massive. We’ve gone from Jimmy’s claims that it’s a human rights violation, to your claims that the opinions of the CESCR matter in terms of determining whether or not there was a human rights violation, to the claim that their opinions “carry considerable weight within the UN system.” And with this, you cite a claim that a body whose very existence was unilaterally declared, and whose advisory powers were never ratified because only 3 countries actually want them to have any relevancy, must be obeyed or other nations show “bad faith”.
To say nothing of the fact that you’ve cited yet another irrelevant functionary at the UN. Yes yes, you pull a variation on “It’s just your opinion maaaaaaan!” but this is quickly becoming yet another of your tired tactics. Faced with the facts about something, you claim it’s meaningful despite the facts, because it’s required for your argument. The HCHR was created by the General Assembly with non-binding, extra-legal advisory power, only. The HCHR does not have the power to legally interpret a treaty and declare what good faith efforts to adhere to it are, or are not. The UN General Assembly created a bureaucratic position, not one that determines how treaties are to be understood or adhered to.
Goalpost shifting from whether or not it has any relevance now to a claim that, perhaps at some unspecified point in the future, it may have relevance. But still not for South Korea or the United States, which are the parties involved in Jimmy’s claim today and who have not run afoul of any human rights laws today.
Weaksauce.
While this is a nother attempt to claim more things about the treaty than it actually says, this also doesn’t hold water. Nations are not obliged to part with their wealth or natural resources. That means that nations are not obliged to give up their food or money to pay for food in order to provide charitable aid. The actual treaty, again, shows that your claims about it are false. Because you’re using it as a rationalization rather than simply admitting that in both international law and international custom, what the US and SK are doing is 100% legal and not a violation of human rights, at all. And again you’ve invented an “obligation” that doesn’t actually exist, as there is not an “international obligation” to provide charitable aid to other nations; we’ve been over that, many times, and it seems that we’re now playing whack a mole.
Ah, and now the time-worn tactic of fail in claiming that when you’re wrong about something, it must really be because someone else hasn’t read something that they did read. Rather obviously, most likely everybody else understood that Mlees comment was about how nations hadn’t ratified the OP so that there would not be a relevant body able to actually have any legal input in telling them how to conduct their affairs. Your gambit about how there is already an (irrelevant) body telling them what to do, so his objection makes no sense, is risible.
You’re actually arguing that the fact that nations that didn’t want to be bound by the CECSR is immaterial, because an irrelevant committee was already criticizing them, so wanting to avoid criticism wasn’t their goal.
That’s exactly what the facts show. If nations routinely disregard their views, then the custom is not informed by them. This is basic.“Customary international law results from a general and consistent practice of states followed by them from a sense of legal obligation.”
Ah, another variation on “It’s just your opinion maaaaaaan!”
Unfortunately, the facts show that I’m right, and your handwaving is absurd. Jimmy is a proven liar known to falsify, distort and outright invent facts when it supports his narrative. This is simply the fact of the matter. Trying to handwave away facts by pretending that the proven facts are just a different “view” is a gambit, but it’s not a particularly strong one. You need to deny the facts in order to claim that, well, this time Jimmy is being totally honest and we should believe him. Well, that’s your issue.
And as Jimmy has already been shown to be 100% wrong on this issue, untrustworthy in general, and your argument has been shown to not only be wrong, but also a pack of rationalizations designed to support a position which it still can not…
Carter is involved in Habitat for Humanity.
He is involved in election monitoring in many countries to try and keep election honest.
He seems to feel bad , and tries to help when people are starving.
He is a religious man who lives his religion.
If he is a loon, the world needs a lot more of them.
No, the problem is that Carter has a bad habit of bending (or outright falsifying) the truth when it serves his political narrative. As has been shown throughout the thread, thinking that nations have a positive obligation to provide food aid, lest they violate human rights, is indeed a loony position.
Awfully relevant though that he builds houses, houses being much like international law in that they are both things.
Jimmy Carter Quotes Carter quotes. He was trying to get us to go solar in 1977.
Ah, I see we’ve entered the free association phase of the lightning round.
Hamas feeds hungry Palestinians and builds houses. They build schools. They are religious people who live their religion. Therefore any problems with the fact that they bomb school buses, execute those who disagree with them, and think that OBL was a great man, is not to be discussed. If they are loons the world needs more loons like them. Name a villain. I bet he or she did some good things in their lifetime. They probably liked kittens. Doing some good things does not excuse anything else that you do.
Yes, Carter has not always been a dishonest and/or senile doofus and even in his current condition he is still able to do some good things. He is no villain but his other decent works do not change the fact that he is a dishonest doofus at best in much of what he says and does lately.
I think that’s the crux of the issue. If Carter had said, for instance, that it was not morally correct for us to discontinue aid to North Korea, then that would at least be an honest discussion we could have. It would still be incorrect, but it’d at least be honest. To claim, however, that it’s a violation of human rights is simply an absurdity. It shows that Jimmy isn’t interested in honest discussion so much as he’s interested in dishonest polemics.