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Ratification of U.N. Convention Disabilities Treaty Could Threaten Parental Rights

Ratification of U.N. Convention Disabilities Treaty Could Threaten Parental Rights

The U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday on the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), a treaty that, if ratified, could undermine parental rights and those of people with disabilities.

According to Mike Farris, founder and chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), while the UNCRPD was narrowly defeated through calls and emails to U.S. senators in 2012, the treaty is back again and its supporters are preparing to ensure its ratification.

“This United Nations treaty says ‘in all actions concerning children with disabilities, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration,'” Farris writes. “Not ‘parental rights,’ as our U.S. Supreme Court has ruled. But ‘best interests of the child,’ a legal term only used during divorce and abuse and neglect cases.”

“Government officials could use this section to override parental decisions for their child with a disability,” Farris states. “Other provisions of this treaty threaten U.S. sovereignty, promote abortion rights, and require a national registry of all children with disabilities (the term ‘disability’ isn’t even defined.).”

According to Farris, while the UNCPRD appears to be about protecting the disabled, the United States already has laws that accomplish this goal.

“It’s about whether we will surrender our freedom to an unelected, unaccountable United Nations,” he said.

Farris writes that supporters of the UNCPRD believe they have found the way to ratify the treaty with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bond v. United States, which was issued last month. That case, which involved a betrayed wife who used household chemicals in a botched attempt to poison her husband’s mistress, quickly ended up centering on a major constitutional issue dealing with the Chemical Weapons Ban treaty, congressional action, and the Constitution.

Though the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government should not prosecute the hapless spurned wife, only three justices–Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Samuel Alito–addressed the Treaty Power found in the Constitution.

As Breitbart News’ senior legal analyst Ken Klukowski wrote about the case:

…As Scalia–joined by Thomas–concluded, “We have here a supposedly ‘narrow’ opinion which, in order to be ‘narrow,’ sets forth interpretive principles never before imagined that will bedevil our jurisprudence (and proliferate litigation) for years to come.” Regarding a very old case’s suggestion statutes can reach almost any issue if necessary to carry treaties into effect, they added, “we should have welcomed and eagerly grasped the opportunity–nay, the obligation–to consider and repudiate it.”

Farris affirms the three justices articulated concern about “how treaties can threaten our system of limited federal government and our constitutional freedoms.”

Since Bond was decided, Farris writes, numerous organizations have issued press releases calling for immediate ratification of the UNCRPD.

Now is the time to let the Senate hear loud and clear that Americans are firmly opposed to surrendering our sovereignty, parental rights, and the rights of people with disabilities to unelected, unaccountable UN bureaucrats,” asserts Farris.


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