Seventeen days after 11 September 2001, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1373 creating a new international legal obligation to cooperate in preventing terrorism. In announcing this support for U.S. President George Bush's campaign against terrorism, the UN Secretary-General pointed out that the United States had not yet joined two UN treaties designed to curb terrorism by blocking underground financial flows and implementing a global system of pursuit and prosecution.¹ That same day, the Secretary-General also put the UN's human rights treaty bodies on alert to look for possible abuses in the course of combating terrorism.

In 2002, as President Bush and Congress debated whether or not to ignore the United Nations Security Council and invade Iraq, many legal scholars noted that a preemptive strike would violate the United Nations Charter—an opinion later reiterated by the Secretary-General.

With the 2004 release of photos depicting prisoner abuse in Iraq, the nation began to discuss the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. The violation of these treaties was almost universally condemned.

Executive summary

Despite the fact that the United States was one of the driving forces behind establishing the United Nations in 1945 and initiated many of the multilateral treaties that have encouraged cooperation on our planet, there has been a steady decline in the U.S. government's support of the UN and the agreements it helped establish.

President George W. Bush has been particularly reluctant to participate in the multilateral treaty system. Thus far, President Bush has signed six treaties—the fewest of any president since the five signed during President Reagan's first term—and none of the six treaties forwarded by President Bush to the U.S. Senate for consideration has been ratified to date. More importantly, President Bush has reversed U.S. support for at least six major treaties by:

• Ending U.S. involvement in the Kyoto Protocol on climate change negotiations.
• Violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by developing new nuclear weapons and negotiating a new pact with Russia that does not comply with its terms.
• Pulling out of the negotiations for a verification protocol under the Convention on Biological and Toxin Weapons, effectively halting all further talks under this treaty.
• Reversing a prior U.S. commitment to ratify the Landmine Convention by 2006.
• Withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
• Nullifying the obligations of the U.S. signature on the International Criminal Court. ²

President Bush is the first president to nullify the United States' signature from a multilateral treaty and the first leader of a major power to withdraw from a nuclear treaty after it became legally binding.

In contrast, other UN members committed themselves to 927 new "treaty actions" between 2000-2004—each pledging a nation's intention to comply with one of the treaties in the United Nations Treaty Collection. During the opening session of the 2004 General Assembly from 21-24 September at least 101 treaty actions were taken in response to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's annual invitation to adopt more treaties. For example:

• Liberia's new government announced 18 treaty actions including ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
• Burundi and Guyana together with Liberia added three new ratifications to the 94 already supporting the International Criminal Court.
• Libya decided to join four treaties concerning children's rights, the smuggling of migrants and the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer.
• Cambodia signed the Optional Protocol on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Protection of Migrant Workers and Their Families and two treaties dealing with trafficking and exploitation of people.

Altogether, the U.S. has ratified just 160 of the 550 treaties reviewed for this report³— fewer than one out of three or about 29 percent.

The chief reason for the lack of U.S. participation in the multilateral treaty system, according to many analysts, is that our nation is fundamentally reluctant to surrender its sovereignty to any other authority.

However, a closer scrutiny of the record suggests a different story. The White House has been more than willing to surrender its sovereignty to international trade agreements (for example, aggressively negotiating commercial deals that require significant changes in not only our national laws but also many state and local laws throughout the nation).⁴

Consider the following.⁵ Over the years, the United States has ratified:

• None of the three fundamental treaties codifying the multilateral treaty system.
• None of the nine treaties in the UN Treaty Collection on penal matters that enable the international community to cooperate in handling transnational crime, corruption and mercenaries.
• Just 14 of the International Labor Organization's 162 active treaties—not quite 9 percent—and only two of the eight "core conventions" protecting the fundamental rights of working people.
• 13 of the 44 human rights treaties in the UN Treaty Collection—just under 30 percent.
• 12 of 38 major environmental treaties—about 32 percent.
• The Geneva Conventions of 1949 governing wartime behavior to protect human rights, but not the two related protocols covering armed conflict and internal state conflicts—33 percent.
• 12 of 22 treaties establishing private rights over intellectual property and related technologies—almost 55 percent.
• 13 of 22 weapons treaties controlling nuclear, chemical, biological and conventional arms—59 percent.
• Six of nine treaties under the Food and Agriculture Organization that manage fisheries, timber, pesticides, rice and genetic resources—not quite 67 percent.
• All 13 of the treaties addressing international terrorism—100 percent.

Plainly, our government is selective about when it will and when it won't subordinate U.S. sovereignty to another authority. This data suggests that the U.S. government may be less interested in treaties that promote the rights of people and protect the planet and more interested in those that extend its control over the world's resources. Such a conclusion is further supported by a number of the intriguing details⁶ we discovered about the treaties we studied more closely:

• Only two countries have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child: the United States and Somalia (which currently has no sitting government).
• After decades of negotiations, the White House now supports ratification of the Law of the Sea Convention with an understanding that parties to this treaty have the exclusive right to define which of their own activities at sea qualify as military activities, creating a loophole to avoid the convention's goal of limiting military control of the open oceans.
• Similarly, the United States evades provisions of the Basel Protocol on Hazardous Wastes by defining the export of most toxic materials as "recycling."
• Because the United States has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers, Mexico and the other parties cannot fulfill their obligation under this treaty to protect the millions of foreign nationals working in substandard conditions in the U.S.
• The United States has not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women despite the fact that 17 U.S. states, 18 counties and and 45 cities have passed local resolutions in support.⁷
• Of nuclear-capable countries, China, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan have not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty—nor has the United States.

These and other facts demonstrate that the U.S. government—under both Democratic and Republican leadership—is inclined to participate in those multilateral agreements that expand its global access to resources and markets while neglecting or, worse yet, undermining those that support social development around the world.

This trend predates the presidency of George W. Bush but the current administration has accelerated and amplified the United States' go-it-alone approach to global affairs with little regard for other nations and peoples including those that suffer from hunger, disease, oppression and the other scourges of humanity.

1. On 26 June 2002, the United States ratified two of 12 anti-terrorism treaties.

2. Although signed by President Clinton in 1993, President Bush effectively ended U.S. involvement in the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. Formal U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 was the first time a major power withdrew from a nuclear treaty after it had become legally binding. The United States is currently party to the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. However, President Bush declared the United States would use nuclear weapons in preemptive strikes, a clear violation of NPT, and his team blocked completion of a draft protocol to BWC, halting all further negotiations for the indefinite future. Even though the U.S. assisted in establishing the International Criminal Court, President Bush formally nullified the U.S. signature to the court in 2002.

3. In preparing this report, we reviewed a total of 550 treaties including all those deposited with the UN Secretary-General, the International Labor Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization; the Geneva Conventions, deposited with the Swiss Federal Council; and those addressing disarmament and terrorism deposited with various UN agencies, regional organizations and national governments.

4. See, for example, Senate Joint Resolution No. 19 of the State of California, 21 May 2003 at http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/03-04/bill/sen/sb_0001-0050/sjr_19_bill_20030521_introduced.html; "Balancing Democracy and Trade: Assessing the Impact of Trade and Investment Agreements on California Law" by the Harrison Institute for Public Law at Georgetown University Law Center, April 2001; or Private Rights/Public Problems: A Guide to NAFTA's Controversial Chapter on Investors' Rights at http://biodiversityeconomics.org/pdf/topics-408-00.pdf.

5. A thorough explanation of the choices we made in selecting, categorizing and analyzing the specific treaties referenced in this report can be found in the research methodology segment of Section IV.

6. These and other intriguing details can be found in the "interesting information" field for each of the 43 treaty overviews in Section IV.

7. womenstreaty.org