The United Nations pseudo-“human-rights” bureaucracy released another report attacking Americans’ self-defense rights, “Stand Your Ground” statutes passed at the state level, and the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment protection of the people’s God-given right to keep and bear arms without government infringement. Agreeing with the Obama administration and the most extreme anti-Second Amendment members of Congress, the UN “Human Rights Committee” also claimed that the U.S. government needed to expand the unconstitutional background-check regime to include even private firearms sales.
In a section of the report entitled “gun violence,” the UN “experts,” virtually all of whom come from governments that do not recognize the fundamental human right to possess weapons or of self-defense, claimed to be “concerned” about multiple issues surrounding U.S. gun laws. Despite “measures taken to reduce gun violence,” an advance of the UN document claims, “the Committee remains concerned about the continuing high numbers of gun-related deaths and injuries and the disparate impact of gun violence on minorities, women and children.” It was not immediately clear where the outfit obtained its data.
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Especially troubling to the UN bureaucrats was the alleged “discriminatory effect of ‘Stand Your Ground Laws,’” according to the report. While the UN “experts” praised an “investigation” conducted by the federal “Commission on Civil Rights” into the popular state protections for self-defense rights, the unelected international committee claimed to be “concerned about the proliferation of such laws that are used to circumvent the limits of legitimate self-defence [sic] in violation of the State party’s duty to protect life.” The report marks at least the third time in recent months that self-styled UN authorities have used discredited arguments to attack American protections for fundamental human rights.
“The State Party [the U.S. government] should take all necessary measures to abide by its obligation to effectively protect the right to life,” the report continues, despite the fact that studies show widespread gun ownership protects lives. “In particular, it should: (a) continue its efforts to effectively curb gun violence, including through the continued pursuit of legislation requiring background checks for all private firearm transfers … and (b) review Stand Your Ground Laws to remove far-reaching immunity and ensure strict adherence to the principles of necessity and proportionality when using deadly force in self-defence.”
In other words, the UN is now brazenly and openly pushing for radical and unconstitutional changes to both U.S. and state law. In particular, the report is calling for a massive expansion of the background-check regime — a plot that was so extreme it did not even make it through the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate amid a full-blown assault on gun rights by the Obama administration. Critics have attacked the controversial idea from all angles, but especially troublesome are the constitutional implications, as well as well-founded suspicions that the Obama administration is unlawfully trying to use background checks to compile a national gun registry in defiance of federal law.
Separately, the UN report called for the federal government to launch an attack on states’ Stand Your Ground laws. Those laws, adopted by about half of American states so far, protect the self-defense rights of all people in those jurisdictions, ensuring that they do not have to flee from potentially murderous attackers. Despite UN demands, the federal government, of course, has no legitimate authority over state self-defense laws. Obviously the UN has no power in that area either, although it is seeking it. The UN, for example, recently helped the murderous socialist regime in Venezuela disarm law-abiding civilians (sparking even more violence and murder) while pushing global gun control via the UN “Arms Trade Treaty.”
In September of last year, meanwhile, the dictator-dominated UN came under massive criticism after further illustrating its bizarre ignorance of, or more likely, hostility to the U.S. Constitution and state-level protections for self-defense and other human rights. In a press release, multiple UN “human rights” bureaucrats even called on the Obama administration “nullify” state laws that the globalist outfit believes are “discriminatory” — taking particular aim at “Stand Your Ground” protections. Of course, neither the UN nor the U.S. government has the power to “nullify” anything; nullification is what the Founding Fathers promoted as a tool of state governments to stop federal abuses and usurpations.
To the UN, though, America’s traditions and Constitution appear to matter little, if at all, in the quest for what it calls “global governance” — also known as global government. “States are required to take effective measures to review governmental, national and local policies, and to amend, rescind or nullify any laws and regulations which have the effect of creating or perpetuating racial discrimination wherever it exists,” claimed Mutuma Ruteere, the UN “Special Rapporteur on Racism,” in a factually challenged screed about American protections for gun ownership and self-defense rights. Other self-styed UN “experts” made similar comments, earning prompt ridicule and criticism from across America.
In its most recent report on alleged “human rights violations” in America, the international outfit also lashed out at the U.S. government for deporting illegal immigrants convicted of crimes. It slammed the purported lack of taxpayer-funded healthcare and welfare for illegal immigrants as well. Felons, meanwhile, must be allowed to vote despite state laws, the UN committee claimed. According to the radical UN “experts,” the U.S. government should also ignore the Constitution’s limits on federal power to pass legislation banning corporal punishment of children — including spankings by parents in the home used as a disciplinary tool.
The latest anti-constitutional UN demands to curtail the constitutionally protected rights of Americans and enforce international mandates came in a recently released report produced by a self-styled group of 18 UN “human rights experts.” Supposedly charged with monitoring obedience to a controversial international scheme on “Civil and Political Rights,” the UN committee had both praise and condemnation for the Obama administration. In all, the global outfit identified more than two dozen supposed U.S. “human-rights violations.”
Some of the purported violations do, in fact, represent legitimate instances of the Obama administration’s increasingly anti-constitutional lawlessness and abuses. For example, the UN committee said U.S. government officials responsible for torture, enforced disappearances, “unlawful killings,” and similar crimes ought to be prosecuted and punished. It also blasted the Obama administration’s global mass-murder spree using drones, as well as the spying perpetrated by the National Security Agency (NSA). All of those U.S. government crimes, of course, could be dealt with simply by enforcing the U.S. Constitution as written.
Among other supposed “human rights” violations, the UN committee identified “the overrepresentation of individuals belonging to racial and ethnic minorities in prisons and jails,” state and local law-enforcement activities such as “excessive use of force,” the death penalty, domestic violence, alleged “criminalization” of the homeless by state and local authorities, prison conditions, juvenile justice, and more. To comply with its “recommendations,” however, the U.S. government would have to go even further outside its constitutional boundaries and essentially take over state and local government.
All of the very real problems identified by the UN committee — torture, impunity, murder-by-drone, unlawful spying, brutal forced “psychiatric” treatment, mass incarceration, and more — would not even be an issue if authorities were following the U.S. Constitution and respecting the people’s God-given rights. Many of the other alleged “problems,” though, arise from a fundamental conflict in the understanding of human rights. In the American system, rights such as self-defense and gun ownership come from God and cannot be legitimately infringed on by government, which is instituted specifically to protect those rights.
Under the UN’s bizarre version of “human rights,” however, rights are granted by governments and can be restricted or abolished at will — and may in “no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations,” according to Article 29 of the UN “Declaration of Human Rights.” In other words, they are revocable government-granted privileges instead of unalienable God-given rights and protected by the U.S. Constitution. Obviously, the two views on human rights are incompatible with each other at a basic level. The fact that some of the world’s most brutal communist and Islamist dictatorships were put on the UN “Human Rights Council” last year exemplifies the conflict well.
Despite the UN’s increasingly outrageous attacks on American freedoms, constitutional governance, values, self-government, traditions, human rights, and more, the Obama administration said in its proposed 2015 budget that it wants to supersize U.S. funding for the international outfit and its oftentimes ruthless global military. The pressure to have the U.S. government permanently withdraw from the so-called “dictators club” entirely, however, is growing fast — especially as the UN becomes increasingly brazen in its assaults on America.
The UN wants the U.S. government to impose its “recommendations,” and then submit “relevant information” to the global outfit about its implementation of those demands within one year. A better plan would be to obey the U.S. Constitution and get the United States out of the UN, and the UN out of the United States. H.R. 75: The American Sovereignty Restoration Act, introduced by Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), would do precisely that.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.
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