Letter: U.N. treaties bad for America

Friday, Jan. 19, 2001 | 9:33 a.m.

In April 1992, by an unrecorded vote, a handful of senators ratified the U.N.'s Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a document that mandates U.N. intervention in our nation's internal affairs at potentially lethal expense to our Bill of Rights.

On Oct. 18 the Senate ratified, in similarly stealthy fashion, a package of 34 treaties, including the U.N. Convention to Combat Decertification, through which the U.N. may claim the power to regulate the use of both private and public lands in this country.

According to Henry Lamb of the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), the decertification treaty "claims jurisdiction over 70 percent of the Earth's land area -- virtually all of the land that is not covered by the Convention on Biological Diversity.

"Moreover, this new treaty creates a structure through which all other environmental treaties are supposed to be integrated under a common United Nations implementation regime."

The Senate's willingness to rubber-stamp unconstitutional U.N. treaties by unrecorded voice vote suggests that the International Criminal Court Treaty, if signed by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or a future president, may be adopted in the same way.

It also illustrates the immediate need for Americans to pressure Congress to enact legislation withdrawing the United States from the U.N. altogether.

CHARLIE DELZOTTI