Why has the international community done such a poor job of drafting treaties?

Great Debates
1

In the past 10 or 20 years, there have been a number of major international agreements. They have received lots of publicity, but they were so badly constructed that the United States could not sign on. Examples that come to mind are the International Criminal Court, Kyoto, the Law of the Sea, and the women’s treaty (I do not know the exact name). In addition, one sees some foolish actions by the General Assembly of the United Nations. More than one poster questioned the ICC (on another thread), because the world community’s record does not inspire confidence.

– Why is the world community drafting bad treaties?
– What can be done to get good treaties?

2

For the same reason the Constitution is so “poorly drafted” - treaties, particularly multilateral treaties, are compromises between conflicting interests.

Sua

3

Let me post a better Great Debate

Why is december congenitally unable post a factually supportable OP which is not simply cribbed from whatever the latest Merkin neo-Con Obsession of the Moment?

An alternative might be to suggest to december, although of course the effort is futile, that he might entertain the concept of looking into his bundles of assertions and consider alternative explanations before reaching a priori conclusions based on a highly suspect, at best, analysis.

Or in short, the fact the US has not found it in its interest (more properly the American government in the collective in the past 10 years) to sign on to several high profile treaties (not all of which are UN sponsored, and the connection with the General Assembly is inexistant in any case) in no way indicates that the ‘international community’ is bad at drafting treaties.

It indicates that
(a) post-Cold War the US has drifted toward unilateralism in policy
(b) The US has not seen said treaties to be in its overall interest
© The majority of the international community has disagreed with the American analysis
(d) US versus rest-of-world perceptions of interests seem to be diverging.

The treaties in question may or may not be poorly drafted.

4

Why does december assume that, if the United States decides not to adhere to a particular treaty, it is because the treaty is badly drafted?

Question: does the US government take decisions about whether to adhere to a treaty on the basis of

(a) the quality of the drafting, or

(b) whether becoming subject to the treaty obligations is in the interests of the US?

December feels that the correct answer is (a), and presumably he is happy about that. Otherwise it would make more sense for him to open a thread questioning the policy of the US government in this regard.

Unless, of course december believes that the proper object of all multilateral treaties is to serve the interests of the US and those which do not do so are, ipso facto, badly drafted.

5

I think december thinks the international treaties are “poor” because they don’t uniformly kiss the United States’ ass.

6

To all: Foreign Affairs runs an occasional series of articles called “Between the Lines,” which dissect the text of various multilateral treaties, UN resolutions, and the like, underlining particularly knotty spots with marginal notes as to why the language came out the way it did (usually, as has already been mentioned, because of compromises between competing interests). They are usually most enlightening.

This month’s issue has one called “Havens Can Wait,” on a letter form the OECD deputy secretary general titled “Ending Tax Haven Abuse.” Writing a treaty that a) someone will actually sign and b) actually has some teeth in it can be a nasty and complex balancing act; it’s a wonder any treaties ever get signed at all, and that any of the ones that do get signed have any effect at all.

December, can you cite a treaty which you think is “good”? Why is it good? Who ratified it? Were there happy outcomes for all signatories?

7

Thank you all for a completely assinine and flamingly stupid non-argument, which manages to insult without, in any way, shape, or form, adress the actual point.

Eva Luna excepted.

8

Maybe you don’t get it but to me it is quite clear that the OP asks "Why is the world community drafting bad treaties?"and the rest are disagreeing with that premise. What is “assinine” about that? Since when do we have to accept the premise at face value? The OP has been asked to explain and support his premise but, rather than that, he has taken French leave.

9

december: In the past 10 or 20 years, there have been a number of major international agreements.

And quite a big number, too. Starting from this handy-dandy International Treaties page, and looking at only the most major international instruments potentially involving the US over the past twenty years, I get a rough count of about six agreements on weapons and warfare, two or three on intellectual property, three or four on human rights and international criminal jurisdiction, several on international trade (sorry, can’t post the link), and five to ten on environmental protection and biodiversity (and there are probably lots of important items in all categories that I just passed over).

So if you can only think of four or so out of that whole bunch that you consider “badly constructed”, that doesn’t sound to me like such a bad record.

They have received lots of publicity, but they were so badly constructed that the United States could not sign on. Examples that come to mind are the International Criminal Court, Kyoto, the Law of the Sea, and the women’s treaty (I do not know the exact name).

Well, in fact we did sign on to the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, but both Congress and the current Administration have balked at the provision that the Court’s jurisdiction would extend to members of the US armed services and other US nationals—just as it would to all other citizens and servicepeople of the rest of the signatories. Bush noted in his signing statement that “it is not in the interests of the United States to become a party to the ICC treaty” and that he intends to “take actions to protect U.S. nationals from the purported jurisdiction of the treaty.” Since then, the US has been trying to rewrite the Statute to get unilaterally excepted from most of its applications, but it is not receiving much encouragement internationally.

Likewise, we signed the Kyoto Protocol, but decided not to ratify it on the grounds that it would be bad for us economically. Similar deal back in 1982 for the Law of the Sea, whose provisions on deep seabed mining might have interfered with US industrial objectives.

*Why is the world community drafting bad treaties? *

I join the other posters here in thinking that you haven’t done diddly-squat so far to support the contention that the US is rejecting these treaties because they’re “bad”. A perfectly plausible alternative is that the US, being at present the superpower, has little incentive to constrain itself by international agreements if it can get away with not doing so. As it has been famously remarked, “Rules are for the little guys.”

Mind you, I don’t especially approve of that unilateralist approach to international diplomacy: I think it’s incredibly shortsighted and merely generates more international tension and hostility without doing a damn thing to solve such serious problems facing the world as the danger of nuclear weapons, global warming, human rights violations, and world poverty and hunger.

But “Big guys don’t need no stinkin’ rules” seems to be the approach that our government is currently pursuing. At least, I’ve seen absolutely no evidence in your OP to support your hypothesis that our government really wants to pursue international cooperation but can’t do it because the treaties are just so damn lousy.

10

Well, to be perfectly fair, U.N. Ambassador Madeline Albright was pursuing a similarly worded exemption for U.S. peacekeepers for the Clinton administration; and in fact that administration did express concern over both that exemption and jurisdictional issues involving non-party states.

What’s more, Clinton himself put off signing the Rome Treaty until the deadline, Dec. 31, 2000, when he had only 20 days left in office; and he stated when he signed, “In signing, however, we are not abandoning our concerns about significant flaws in the Treaty. In particular, we are concerned that when the Court comes into existence, it will not only exercise authority over personnel of states that have ratified the Treaty, but also claim jurisdiction over personnel of states that have not” but noted that “Signature will enhance our ability to further protect U.S. officials from unfounded charges and to achieve the human rights and accountability objectives of the ICC.” Not that I would dare to question the unflagging devotion and honesty of Mr. Clinton, but I can’t help but feel that he saw the future coming like a cab down Broadway with its doors open and determined to put the incoming administration in a bad position with Kyoto and Rome.

So it isn’t just the Bush administration that has concerns regarding possibly politicized cases before the ICC; the Clinton administration felt the same concerns, but felt we could better bring the whole thing down from inside rather than outside. :wink:

11

Couple more points:

  1. I meant Foreign Policy, not Foreign Affairs. I highly recommend the series of colums to all; it dissects the instrument-of-the-month paragraph by paragraph, pointing out all parties’ interests and objections. Very enlightening.
  2. Even if you don’t agree with december’s POV, or the way he phrased the question, there are much politer and more constructive ways to point out whatever you feel the flaws/fallacies are than a number of you have done. Snippiness without contrary analysis serves no purpose, unless you just enjoy pointing out how superior you are. In fact, you’d do much better at showing your intellectual superiority if you backed it up with specifics, IMHO.
12

I suppose you could also add to the reasons given in the responses (to yet another utterly ridiculous OP), that the period in question coincides with the end of the Cold War. Life is a whole lot different if you’re the only superpower, not least as the political obligation to compromise with the general tenor of international opinion is diluted – ya don’t need to play as nice with the concerns of your erstwhile allies (ICC, Kyoto, etc) because you just don’t need them as much (example: NATO).

Of course, different Administrations take different views on whether the status of singular superpower implies other kinds of obligations (perhaps leadership rather than Isolationism), And yet others, it now seems, aren’t really politically founded at all but, instead, are corporate opportunists usurping the political process in order to pursue a very particular self-serving agenda.

One imagines, and hopes in my case, history will paint these people as having failed to pull the wool over the eyes of their people and, also, that they did not damage too seriously an interesting and progressive period of international cooperation.

13

December you are wasting your time here. Move to Hollywood and work for “The Simpsons”. You could write Homer’s dialogues.

Many have comented about Icc and Kyoto treaties. I would like to refer about “the law of the sea” the main problem with it was the extension of territorial seas. Powerfull nations wanted “freedom of the seas” (which meant that they would own it) the others wanted to extend the territorial sea all they could. In every treaty there are a lot of opposed interests. Then a good treaty is not one which is “good drafted” but one in which a compromise can be reached.

14

If december hadn’t been nurturing and building a reputation as a drive-by provocateur using random anecdotes and half-baked editorials as “facts,” I’d completely agree with you.

As it is, december gets the responses he’s received largely because of his track record in this area, as noted many times both in Great Debates and The BBQ Pit. Chiding other posters because they actually learned from their experiences seems a tad misguided IMO.

15

Eva, (like smiling bandit) you are new around here aren’t you? :wink:

I agree with you that politeness is a useful virtue in foreign relations but you might want to search the board for some historical perspective on december’s posting style. You might want to have a look at this thread. And after that I have had many similar encounters with december until I decided it was not worth my time but if you read a few threads you may understand the exasperation of the general public around here.

16

Yep, I’m newer than it looks like most of you who hang around GD are. I certainly understand everyone’s exasperation with those who they can’t get to “see the light,” but yet, somehow, I hope I never lose my dewy-eyed enthusiasm. Perhaps you may see it as a sign of naivete; that’s OK. It’s just a sypmptom of my pigheaded, neverending optimism, and one of the many reasons why I know I’d suck as a real-life diplomat.

However, just think how different the world would be if, say, Arafat and Sharon could continue to negotiate like gentlemen? Just a thought. At least in cyberspace, we have the luxury of knowing that no matter how wrong the other party is, how long he persist in not seeing the error of his ways, or how naive we were in assuming his noble intentions, it’s pretty likely nobody will die because of it. So I try my best to be patient and not get my panties in a bunch, and I think my blood pressure is much lower for it.

17

Sorry to post an OP and disappear. I was off on vacation without an available computer.

Treaties like Law of the Sea and Kyoto are worthless to all, once the US and other leading powers fail to sign on. So, in practice, all the work that went into desiging them was a waste of time. If the people drafting worthless treaties weren’t paid for their work, they might become more practical!

Can you please supply evidence for these four points?

I think an example of bad treaty-drafting work was the foo-faw over the exemption for US peacekeepers from the new International Criminal Court. A representative of the Court stated that it was most unlikely that any US peace-keeper would be tried; that was not its purpose. Yet, there was enormous resistance to granting the exemption. In the end, they granted only a year.

Assuming the rep was correct about the Court’s purpose, it was needlessly confrontational for the drafters to resist the exemption.

18

Yeah, let’s talk about the ICC. I think we haven’t talked about it enough yet. We need to talk a lot about the ICC, don’t we now?

19

It was like Christmas in July around here without you, december :smiley:

20

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (a.k.a. CEDAW) has been ratified by 170 countries - about 90% of UN members. We’re in the company of countries like Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iran, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and UAE on this one. The Convention on the Rights of the Child has been ratified by every country except for Somalia and the United States. Why do so few countries agree that these treaties are too flawed to ratify?