The EU will provide an opportunity for these countries' elites,
who are usually more liberal than average citizens, to change their own
constitutions without the consent of their own people."
As the Irish case illustrates, the U.N. is an ideal forum for governments
to surreptitiously impose policies they could never impose through
national, representative institutions. This is one reason why U.S. gun-
prohibition groups reacted with such fury to the Bush administration's
stance at the U.N. Small Arms Conference.
The U.S. delegation consistently rejected efforts at "compromise," which
would have kept some antigun language in the treaty, but made it softer
and ambiguous. An American delegation that was terrified of being
"isolated" would have accepted the ambiguous language — on the theory that
Americans could later apply a pro-rights interpretation to the
ambiguities. The Bush delegation was wiser: It recognized that, at the
U.N., a conference final document is just a starting point. From there,
U.N. bureaucrats will "monitor" how a country "complies" with such
documents, and the bureaucrats resolving the ambiguities will favor their
own radical agendas. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, for
example, is being reinterpreted by U.N. bureaucrats in ways never agreed
to by the governments that signed the convention.
The U.N.'s assault on Second Amendment rights is merely one aspect of a
far-reaching attack on nearly every aspect of the American Bill of Rights.
Consider, for example, the U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, scheduled for Aug.
31-Sept. 7 in Durban, South Africa. A U.N.-convened "expert seminar" on
anti-racism remedies came up with the following standards for acceptable
anti-racism laws:
First, "the highest priority should be given" to "reparations" for
"descendants of slaves." (Don't expect that this clause will lead to
African governments — successors to those governments which profited most
from the slave trade, by supplying captured enemies for sale to European
traders — to send money to African Americans.)
Additionally, the premise of "innocent until proven guilty" is not
acceptable to the United Nations. The U.N. seminar insists that "In
allegations of racial discrimination, the onus of proof must rest with the
respondent to rebut the allegation made by the victim of racism."
Commendably, the Bush administration is considering boycotting the
conference, or downgrading its delegation, in part because of Arab efforts
to have Zionism proclaimed a form of racism.
The Small Arms Conference helped alert Americans to the nature of the U.N.
threat. Yet while dangers to gun rights, property rights, and family
rights are becoming well known among pro-freedom activists, the U.N.'s
campaigns against due process and free speech have remained more obscure.
La Verkin, Utah, recently declared itself a U.N.-free zone — forbidding
U.N. symbols on city property, stating that U.N. orders are invalid in La
Verkin, and banning city contracts with businesses that work with the U.N.