of the various state legislatures and American courts are required to enforce these treaties in most instances. There are only two ways to get out of a treaty: (1) if the other signatories let us (all 190 nations that sign them in most cases) or (2) by passing a constitutional amendment.
The treaties Obama and Hillary are rushing to completion will permanently cede vast swaths of our national sovereignty to the UN.
We wrote briefly about these treaties in “Tricks or Treaties,” chapter 2 of our previous book,
Here’s what Obama and Hillary are trying to do:
Signed by the president. Up for Senate ratification before the end of the year, it would:
• Give the UN control of the 71 percent of the earth’s surface covered by oceans and seas and all minerals and fish underneath.
• It would likely subject the US to international rules on carbon emissions such as the Kyoto Treaty (never ratified by the Senate) and might be used to force us into a global cap-and-trade system.
• It would curb the ability of the US Navy to perform its historic mission of protecting freedom of the seas and vest the power in a tribunal appointed by the UN secretary-general.
• Give the International Seabed Authority—a group of 193 nations in which we would have but one vote—the power to tax offshore oil and gas wells and pay the revenues, at their discretion, to any third world nation it chooses.
• Oblige our oil and gas companies to share, for free, all of our most modern offshore drilling technology.
A treaty giving the United Nations control over the Internet is now under negotiation (in secret). Responding to proposals by Russia, China, Brazil, and India, the negotiators hope to present a final treaty for signature by the nations of the world at a conference in Dubai in December 2012. It would:
• Give the UN power to regulate online content.
• Allow nations to inspect private email communications by their citizens.
• Permit nations to charge Internet traffic coming in from abroad a fee akin to that charged for long-distance phone calls. So Google, Facebook, Apple, etc., would have to pay tolls to send their content into these nations.
• Give the UN authority to allocate Internet addresses and require it to turn over to member nations (like China) the IP addresses (a unique set of numbers that indicate the geographic location of each and every computer) of each user.
The negotiations are ongoing. The US negotiators will probably succeed in diluting some of these provisions, but the chances for eventual passage of these destructive changes is such that Vinton Cerf, one of the two founders of the Internet, said that the free Internet is now under more threat than ever before.
At a global meeting in New York on July 27, 2012, the nations of the world—including the US—were scheduled sign an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which will empower an international body to regulate the international arms trade. Its goal is eventually to establish a system of worldwide gun control. While paying lip service to the right of private individuals to own, buy, sell, or transfer arms, the body will have a life of its own and the power to require of the signatory nations measures to effectuate the goal of the treaty. These could include gun confiscation and will almost certainly call for universal registration and licensing.
And the global governing body the treaty establishes can pass whatever rules it wants without having to come back to the Senate or to any national legislative body for approval.
The treaty signing was canceled after fifty-one senators said they would oppose its ratification. But it is likely to be approved and finalized by a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly of the UN. Then it would go into effect if ratified by sixty-five nations (easily done). At that point, the US could either sign it or not. If it signed the treaty, we would be bound, under the Vienna Convention, until it was rejected for Senate ratification or renounced by a future president.
The best bet is that Obama signs the treaty after election day and Harry Reid never submits it for ratification so it remains in force until it is either renounced by a President Romney or rejected by a Republican-controlled Senate.
Under the terms of the recently negotiated Rio+20 Treaty, the United Nations Environment Programme, a UN body, will be granted increased power to act as a worldwide Environmental Protection Agency, promulgating global regulations.
The United States will be obliged to contribute to a fund to help third world nations cope with environmental change. At the Rio Conference in June 2012, Secretary of State Clinton pledged $2 billion for this fund, which is expected to reach $100 billion when fully implemented. The US would have only one vote out of 193 in deciding to which regimes these funds will be paid.
This treaty, signed by Clinton and then renounced by President George W. Bush, may be signed again by President Obama during his second term or before he leaves office following an election defeat.
It supersedes the US Supreme Court and makes our entire judicial system subject to the rulings of an international court. The court would have the power to establish the extent of its own jurisdiction and would have the power to adjudicate disputes between Americans on US soil even after the Supreme Court has ruled. Double jeopardy would not attach to its review of American court rulings. The court would not have trial by jury or any of the constitutional protections Americans now enjoy.
Dangerously, it establishes the new global crime of “aggression,” which it defines as going to war without UN Security Council approval. US presidents could be prosecuted criminally after they leave office for violating this new law. In practice, of course, this provision would give Russia and China jurisdiction over the use of the US military.
Under the guise of a “code of conduct” to limit debris in outer space, the Obama administration is negotiating an agreement to limit what satellites or missiles can be put into orbit around the earth. This code is widely seen as a backdoor attempt to reimpose the constraints on defensive anti-missiles embodied in the Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and renounced by President George W. Bush.
Each of these treaties creates a new global entity charged with its enforcement. Whether it is a gun control agency or a Seabed Authority or an International Criminal Court, these treaties empower such agencies. Long after the treaties have been signed and ratified and after the various disclaimers have been inserted by our diplomats protecting our rights and sovereignty, these agencies will remain, able to expand their jurisdiction, legislate new provisions, impose additional taxes and penalties, and require obedience by the signatories to the treaties that set them up—all without any input from us and all without any accountability to us.
These enforcement agencies will inevitably acquire a life of their own, expanding their powers and eroding our sovereignty at every turn. This trend will not be an unintended consequence of these treaties—the systematic erosion of America’s sovereignty and subjecting her wealth and power to global control is quite specifically the intention of these treaties and the people who wrote them.
Each one strips us of control over our own destiny and places our sovereignty under the political control of the United Nations, and not, it must be noted, the Security Council of the UN on which we have a veto. These powers would largely be vested in newly created global bodies in which all of the world’s nations—corrupt or not, democratic or not, free or not, tiny and large—would have an equal say.
And then there is the question of who would obey these treaties. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other outlaw nations have shown no regard for their treaty obligations. They each routinely disregard the provisions of the treaties they have signed and feel in no respect bound by them.
By contrast, law-abiding nations like the United States take their treaty obligations very seriously and are
