Constitution takes hit from Supreme Court *** Ron Paul - "U.S. should Get out of the U.N.!"

Don't look now...
But someone is about to UN-do the last 234 years.
Can you say... social-fascism = Agenda 21?

Citing unapproved treaty is 'act of most fundamental reordering of legal system'.

This is yet another reason Ron Paul has noted on several occasions, we should "get OUT of the U.N"!

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By Bob Unruh
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

The fundamentals of the U.S. Constitution possibly have been shoved one step closer to irrelevance by the U.S. Supreme Court, which yesterday cited as support for its opinion an international treaty that has not been adopted in the U.S.

The issue is raising alarms for those who have been fighting the trend toward adopting "international" standards for American jurisprudence rather than relying on a strict application of theConstitution.

"It is bad enough for the Supreme Court to engage in judicial activism," said Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association. "It is far worse when the justices employ international law in support of their far-reaching edicts.

Don't underestimate the globalists. "The Beast on the East River" presents a
frightening exposé of the United Nations' global power grab and its ruthless
attempt to control U.S. education, law, gun ownership, taxation, and
reproductive rights.

"We have not ratified the U.N. child's rights treaty – its provisions should not be finding their way into Supreme Court decisions," he said.

Roger Kiska, legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund who is based in Europe, said the Supreme Court's use of an unadopted precedent "completely overlooks the checks and balances system that is established by the U.S. Constitution."

It's not the first time the court has done it, and, "It's never
amounted to any good," he said in a telephone interview from his base
of operations in Europe. "It leans toward social radicalism."

He said there are reasons why the U.S. never adopted the U.N. convention,
citing a recent case in Sweden in which a child was taken away from his
home because his parents were homeschooling him, and other issues.

The child, Domenic Johanssen, has been in the custody of social
services agents for almost a year now as his parents have fought
unsuccessfully for his return home.

"That is a prime example of what can happen when the Convention on the Rights of the Child is used as a sword rather than as a shield," Kiska said.

The Graham v. Florida decision dealt with whether young people can
be sentenced to life prison terms if they haven't killed the victims of
their crimes. The issue arose in the case of Terrance Graham,
implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. He now is 23 and
is in a Florida prison – for life.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who frequently swings to the liberal side of the court, said such life sentences are not allowed.

"The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that
he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a non-homicide crime that
he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law," Kennedy's
majority opinion said. "This the Eighth Amendment does not permit."

Wrote Kennedy:

We also note, as petitioner and his amici emphasize, that Article 37(a) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child,
Nov. 20, 1989, 1577 U. N. T. S. 3 (entered into force Sept. 2, 1990),
ratified by every nation except the United States and Somalia,
prohibits the imposition of 'life imprisonment without possibility of
release . . . for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of
age.'

 

Kennedy's opinion continued:

The court has treated the laws and practices of other
nations and international agreements as relevant to the Eighth
Amendment not because those norms are binding or controlling but
because the judgment of the world's nations that a particular
sentencing practice is inconsistent with basic principles of decency
demonstrates that the court's rationale has respected reasoning to
support it.

Jordan Sekulow, director of international operations for the American Center for Law and Justice, told WND the first danger is citing U.N. precedents at all.

Then comes the citation of international concepts that have not been adopted in the U.S.

"When they're citing laws that have not been adopted, they are creating new legal ground," he warned.

"It's great that all these other countries have adopted the
laws, but until we've actually implemented it, it should have no impact
whatsoever on ourSupreme Court," he said.

He warned that such activism will lead the U.S. into trouble.

Other nations' courts already have been busy creating "new human rights" such as the "right" to "health care," he said.

"You can see that line of reasoning in cases," he said.

Farris, who had filed a brief in the Graham case on behalf of
members of Congress, said, "There is simply no place for international
law or practice in interpreting the AmericanConstitution .
International law has its place in deciding truly international cases –
but a case involving juvenile offenders in Florida is a domestic case
through and through.

"It was plainly gratuitous for the majority to employ international law in this context," he said.

Farris also is involved in Parental Rights, an organization urging a U.S. Constitution amendment to protect the rights of parents and families.

The amendment plan already has the support of seven members of the U.S. Senate and more than 130 in the House.

The brief filed by Farris was a response to arguments from
Amnesty International, which sought the inclusion of international
opinion in theSupreme Court ruling.

In claiming the U.S. was the only nation with such penalties,
Amnesty had offered to the court "a hodgepodge of letters and e-mails
supposedly on file in Amnesty's offices. Such 'evidence' would not be
admissible in a traffic court; it is shocking that theSupreme Court relies on such data to make constitutional decisions," Farris said.

"Our brief demonstrated that the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child
(the U.N.'s official monitoring body) had found that dozens of nations
were in violation of the juvenile sentencing standards of the U.N.
child's rights treaty. It is simply fiction to say that the United
States is the only nation which authorizes such sentences," he said.

Farris told WND that references to the Constitution still will remain foundational in Supreme Court opinions. But he said essentially what will happen is that there will be "new content" ascribed to the original document.

"I think that it is an act of the most fundamental reordering of the legal system," he told WND.

The Parental Rights organization is working in support of a plan
submitted by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., whose S. Res. 519 is urging
President Obama to refrain from sending the U.N.Convention on the Rights of the Child to the U.S. Senate for a ratification vote.

"S. Res. 519 seeks to put the Senate of the United States on
record that American law and only American law should govern our
families and our juvenile courts," Farris said. "I hope that every
American who believes that we should remain a self-governing nation
will call their senators today to urge them to become a co-sponsor of
S. Res. 519."

The proposal
expresses "the sense of the Senate that the primary safeguard for the
well-being and protection of children is the family, and that the
primary safeguards for the legal rights of children in the United
States are the Constitutions of the United States and the several
states, and that, because the use of international treaties to govern
policy in the United States on families and children is contrary to
principles of self-government and federalism."

DeMint's proposal explains Professor Geraldine Van Bueren, the
author of the principal textbook on the international rights of the
child and a participant in the drafting of theconvention , has
described the "'best interest of the child standard' in the treaty as
'provid[ing] decision and policy makers with the authority to
substitute their own decisions for either the child's or the parents.'"

The U.N. already has ruled the United Kingdom in violation of the convention
for allowing parents to opt their own children out of a sex education
course and determined both Indonesia and Egypt out of compliance
because of the way those nations structured their national budgets.

A year ago, the HSLDA reported Graham Badman generated a report
reviewed by the U.K. government that stated the UNCRC "gives children
and young people over 40 substantive rights which include the right to
express their views freely, the right to be heard in any legal or
administrative matters that affect them and the right to seek, receive
and impart information and ideas."