The United States and the ICCPR

In 1966, the United Nations adopted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). This document was designed to strengthen and further elaborate upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically regarding the civil rights of individuals, including the freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, and the right to be treated equally (without the distinction of race, gender, or religion).

In 1977, eleven years after the UN ratified the ICCPR, the Carter Administration submitted to document to the U.S. Congress for ratification. However, in Carter’s transmission message, there was an accompanying note that allowed Congress to attach reservations, understandings, or declarations (RUDs) to the document. These stipulations essentially acted as caveats to the ICCPR, outlining which articles the United States would either not obey or would interpret in its own way due to conflict with pre-existing U.S. law.

When the Senate finally ratified the ICCPR in June 1992, the United States had attached thirteen RUDs to the convention. Among these RUDs were five reservations, including those that kept the United States exempt from stipulations on hate speech, capital punishment, the use of “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment,” and the separation of juvenile and adult offenders. In addition, the Senate determined that the covenant would be “non-self-executing,” meaning that it would not act as binding law in U.S. courts.

Although many countries were glad that the United States had finally ratified the ICCPR after 25 years of deliberations, others were concerned about the precedent set by the U.S.’s various reservations. While RUDs are commonly attached to other types of treaties, the U.S.’s application of RUDs to the ICCPR was problematic for a number of international actors. As the UN Human Rights Committee commented in 1995, “Such treaties, and the Covenant specifically, are not a web of inter-State exchanges of mutual obligations. They concern the endowment of individuals with rights.”¹ Based on the universal nature of these rights, the Committee argued, countries like the United States could not pick and choose which ones they did or did not want to obey.

The American approach to the ICCPR demonstrates the problematic nature of the universal values that liberal democracies like the United States have claimed to profess and promote. As George W. Bush stated in his second inaugural address, “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”² For President Bush and for others who follow this philosophy, it is the moral responsibility of free countries like the United States to promote such liberty throughout the world. Yet, as this debate between the United States and the Human Rights Committee demonstrates, the liberal democracies of the world are themselves still in search of a universal conception of liberty, as exceptions and reservations can even be found in a document that lists the most basic and fundamental of rights.