American Enterprise Institute

April 14, 2008

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

11:45 a.m.	Registration and Luncheon
12:00 p.m.	Introduction:	Danielle Pletka, AEI
		Leonard A. Leo, Federalist Society
12:10	Keynote Speaker:	John R. Bolton, AEI
12:30		Introduction of the Global Governance Watch website
	Presenters:	David Peyton, AEI
		Alyssa Luttjohann, Federalist Society
12:45	Panelists:	Ronald A. Cass, Center for the Rule of Law
		Grover Joseph Rees, Department of State
		Claudia Rosett, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
	Moderator:	James P. Kelly III, Federalist Society
1:45	Adjournment

Proceedings:

 Danielle Pletka:  Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute.  I’m Danielle Pletka, I’m the Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies here, and I’m most pleased to welcome you to an event that we are co-hosting with the Federalist Society on Dictating Norms:  Who Decides What Is Right for the World.  And, to inaugurate our shared new project, Global Governance Watch, I’m going to turn the microphone over to my friend and colleague, Leonard Leo, the Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society, to say a few words, and then I’m going to come back to you for just a moment, but, Leonard, if you would come up here.  Thank you very much.  

 Leonard A. Leo:  Thank you very much, Dani Pletka.  Good afternoon everyone.  It is a tremendous privilege for the Federalist Society to be partnering with the American Enterprise Institute in this launch of Global Governance Watch.  It has been a tremendous pleasure working with Dani Pletka, David Peyton, and the AEI staff in reaching this important development, and it is especially a privilege to have Ambassador Bolton supporting this effort in such a wonderful way. 

 As many of you are, I’m sure, aware, sovereignty and self-determination have been essential elements of our constitutional republic since its founding, and, yet, more than ever before, international law and policy are placing enormous pressures on our governing institutions.  Courts, with increasing frequency, are being asked to look to and to adopt foreign, international sources of law in interpreting our Constitution and other important legal instruments.  And, we can all understand how when an international body adopts various resolutions by wide margins how members of the Executive Branch or Legislative Branch may well be pressured to adopt those international norms in developing their own domestic, legal and regulatory policy.  In fact, in my own view, international law today is what constitutional law was 30 years ago, or so.  It’s the empty vessel into which the left and other various groups put their ideas and objectives in order to effect change, change that might not otherwise occur through the normal democratic process. 

 And so we have this partnership between AEI and the Federalist Society in launching Global Governance Watch, which puts a spotlight on the institutions and the civil society groups that drive the development of this international law and public policy.  Global Governance Watch, as Danielle Pletka will, I’m sure, discuss in greater detail, is a build-out or an out-growth of an earlier website called NGO Watch.  NGO Watch, as some of you may remember, focused an awful lot on particular civil society groups and NGOs that were involved in the international law and policy process.  And, at the end of the day, the Federalist Society and AEI thought that we needed to do more than just focus on particular targeted NGOs, we needed to look at the broader global governance network and the institutions that were involved, the broader global governance movement, international organizations, instruments under which they operate, and the groups which regularly pedaled their wares before those international organizations.  And, so, I think that you will find, I hope you will find, that this newly launched website will be a much more relevant and valuable resource, and one that will help to not only inform the citizen, but broaden public debate about the role that international law and policy should have within our own country. 

 And, with that, I will turn the program back over to Ms. Pletka.  [Applause]. 

 Danielle Pletka:  Thank you, Leonard.  It really has been a huge pleasure for those of us at AEI to work with the Federalist Society on this project now for some years.  They bring fresh ideas, a wonderful team of both volunteers and staff, Leonard Leo, of course, who has been at the forefront of this, Jim Kelly, who is newer to the Federalist Society but has been an absolute font of wisdom and work on this, Alyssa Luttjohann, whose name I hope I pronounced properly, since she got married I’ve been entirely confused, but, Alyssa, as well, and their entire staff, on our side, Mauro De Lorenzo and David Peyton, who have done so much work on this. 

 When we started NGO Watch and we held the inaugural conference one of the things that I mentioned was a quote from then Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan.  And, addressing a conference in South Africa, he had an audience full of NGOs, and he said to them, you are the real people.  And our response is, no, we are the real people, we are the voter and we have a government that is accountable, NGOs are not accountable, NGOs are not transparent, NGOs are not elected, and, in fact, national governments, state governments, parliaments, your council, your mayor, these are the folks from whom we can demand accountability.  It was that idea that prompted our effort to more closely scrutinize the activities of non-governmental organizations and what they were doing.  This, really, for us, is an effort to expand that. 

 I think what you see now, particularly in the course of the presidential race, is, you see a growing emphasis on not doing what this administration has done, not being unilateral, but being multilateral and all that that embraces.  A lot of what that means, is, in fact, ceding our governing authority and our sovereignty to international organizations, because, after all, they must represent what is the norm, they must represent what is the international right, and, in some instances, of course, that will absolutely be the case, in others, however, it won’t, and, in all cases, what we have the right to demand as citizens and as taxpayers, is, accountability. 

 This effort, Global Governance Watch, is to really shine, as I think Leonard said very clearly, to shine a light onto what these organizations do on an international level, not just, vis-à-vis, international law, not just on foreign policy or defense policy questions, but, also on corporate governance questions, whether it’s through organizations like the WTO, but, even more specifically, through the United Nations and its specialized organizations, to look at how they start to impact things like corporate social responsibility, environmental regulations.  These are things that demand that we pay close attention and I hope that this website will be a step in that direction.  We welcome any suggestions and input and help from friends and critics alike. 

 To lead off our discussion today, I’m really pleased that Ambassador John Bolton was willing to join us.  I think his credentials are probably very well known to everybody here, but, for AEI, he really, even before I joined AEI, was at the forefront of our work on sovereignty and I think brings a very acute wisdom and, obviously, experience to this question.  John is, as I said, a senior fellow at AEI, but, of course, served as the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations from August, 2005 to December, 2006.  Prior to that, he served for four years as the under secretary of state for arms control and international security.  John, thank you very much for being willing to kick this effort off for us, and let me, without further ado, turn the microphone over to you.  Ambassador John Bolton.  [Applause]. 

 Ambassador John R. Bolton:  Thank you very much, Leonard and Dani, and thanks to the two of you and all of your colleagues who have been working on getting Global Governance Watch ready for launching, and welcome, to all of you, to AEI, I particularly want to welcome all of you who are clinging to your guns and religion.  [Applause].  We, at AEI and the Federalist Society, we cling to things too, so you’ll be welcome here with your fellow peasants.  We particularly cling to the U.S. Constitution, and that’s really where I wanted to start off on my brief remarks today. 

 This issue of global governance I think has two broad aspects to it, one is organizational or institutional, one of it is more substantive.  Even the phrase global governance, of course, is relatively new, because up until about ten years or so ago people instead used the term global government.  But, they’ve dropped that term because they found that there’s not a lot of enthusiasm for it, at least in the United States, so they’ve turned to other approaches.  And, in fact, the organization that, over the decades, was the strongest proponent in the U.S. of global government changed its name.  They used to be called the World Federalist Society, and they attracted, in the early days, right after the founding of the United Nations, they actually attracted a fairly broad base of support.  I have read, for example, that young Congressman Gerald Ford and young Congressman John F. Kennedy at one point were either card carrying members of the World Federalist Society, or at least said nice things about it.  How times have changed as people have come to appreciate that this concept is both unwise and unworkable for the United States. 

 So the World Federalist Society, as I understand it, in the United States no longer exists, and they’ve morphed into some other organizations with names that are indistinguishable from product advertisements.  And, in fact, that reflects the, I think, basic political reality in the United States that the World Federalists had about as much stroke and were as important in our political debate as the Esperanto society, with its notion of a global language. 

 But, still, the institutions of international norming continue, and that really brings me to the substance of the concept of norming itself, which is newer than most people think.  For example, doing a little hasty research before today’s meeting, I looked up in the AEI Black’s Law Dictionary the term use cogens.  Now, AEI, as a traditional institution, I must say, the most recent edition of Black’s Law Dictionary we have is 1933, use cogens isn’t even in it.  Isn’t even in it!  I wish I had looked at mine at home, which is a mere 10 or 12 years old, to see if it made it.  This is something, this idea of compelling law or peremptory norms, even though enshrined in the Vienna Convention on Conventions, itself is a relatively new development.  And I might say, before we go too much further, I think most of you probably know the United States has not ratified the Vienna Convention on Conventions, and, therefore, is not bound by it in any event.  But the idea behind use cogens, and, in fact, behind much of the growth of customary international law in recent years, represents a fundamental change from what scholars and statesmen understood customary international law to be in decades past. 

Customary international law, or, as I prefer to call it, customary international custom, is really the representation of state practice, a state practice which, historically, was something that evolved over decades and that reflected a common sense appreciation of the powers involved as to what norms ought to be to govern their behavior.  It is the sort of evolution that I think we accept and live with, if, in fact, it were left to continue to be customary, as described by state practice.  But what has actually happened in the past several decades is that customary international law and the function of norming has become the captive of the international law professoriate, a dangerously underworked group of people who spend their lives developing new customary international law that doesn’t derive from decades or centuries of state practice but comes from their own political agenda.  And, indeed, the whole idea of use cogens has expanded from the notion that two states cannot, by a bilateral treaty, legitimize genocide or the slave trade.  We now find the world planted thick with use cogens, most of which happen to be contrary to any given American foreign policy on any given day, but which reflect nothing more than the received wisdom of a fairly limited and highly ideologically compatible group of people. 

If one were prepared, if this professoriate were prepared to argue that customary international law, as they understand it, does derive from the natural law of tradition, and that, in fact, since we know where the natural law of tradition derives from, it derives from God, then I would be prepared to grant some additional legitimacy to their line of argument.  I mean, after all, if it’s God’s law, even if being explained by professors, it has a certain amount of force to it.  I doubt, however, that there are any members of the international law professoriate, or at least not very many of them, who believe in God, let alone are prepared to argue that international law, as it’s evolved over the centuries from natural law of tradition, in fact, represents something from the heavens.  Instead, it is a creation of their own overactive intellect and intended to advance an agenda not compatible with, in my judgment, by and large, American interest.  It goes without saying that the Senate of the United States, which happens to be the legislative body in our constitution that deals with international treaties, has never taken a vote on customary international law as a general proposition, or on use cogens, or on what use cogens means, or, in fact, much of anything else, related to this. 

Now, people have argued that customary international law has evolved over the centuries, much like the common law did in England, and, that, therefore, we shouldn’t be concerned about the growth or the authoritativeness of customary international law, because, after all, look at the important role that common law played in the development of our own legal system.  I think the analogy is completely inapposite, and, in any event, the role of common law, particularly in its constitutional dimension, took place at a time when there was no functioning democratic governance system in the United Kingdom.  That was evolving in the same way that common law was evolving to put the King and his agents under the same rule of law that everybody else had to live under. 

So that when asked today why we need this kind of common law system developing, I would say the need for it, at least with respect to countries with systems of representative government, is considerably less.  We have the ability, acting through our representatives, to decide what’s going to govern us, and we don’t need a separate natural law system somehow to put constraints on us.  I think that really is a very fundamental point because the notion that governments themselves can’t decide what they want to be bound by is a fundamentally anti-democratic precept, and it arises in a variety of different ways. 

For example, when the Ottawa convention against landmines was signed in the late 1990s, the United States did not become a party to it, and I doubt ever will become a party to it.  Yet, that didn’t stop the proponents of the Ottawa convention from saying, well, 130, 140 countries have signed it, that is evidence of state practice, like that, and, indeed, landmines are very terrible so the Ottawa convention, as demonstrated in as a customary international law precept, rises to the level of use cogens, and, therefore, the United States is in violation of international law because it still has landmines even though we expressly declined to take part in the convention.  This is the kind of logic that I think we’ve seen develop more and more, and, which, to me, represents a fundamental transformation of customary international law and an assault on democratic theory. 

There are many other ways that this evolves as well, typically utilizing agencies or forums in the U.N. system.  As I think Leonard said, much of the development of norming in these bodies comes as a result, at least on the American side, of people in our political system who are dissatisfied with the political outcome that they’ve achieved at the state or the federal level, and who have determined, basically, to take their arguments into the broader international context, joined by likeminded people from many other countries, especially from our friends in Europe, who see the norming process as a way to constrain the United States.  And here is where our Constitution is a particular obstacle, if I may say so.  A friend of mine, who is a professor international law, told me the story some years ago of being at a convention in an American city where another American professor of international law said, the problem with getting really effective global norming is the Americans, and their attachment to their Constitution, because they’re so stuck on it that they won’t consider these broader norming possibilities.  I wish I had been there, that’s all I can say, I wish I had been there. 

But let me give you some specific examples of how this is played out in recent years.  One of the examples, of course, is the issue of abortion.  This is a very controversial issue in our society, we are arguing it out in practically every federal election that there is, we’re seeing it argued, even as The Washington Post points out, in the democratic primary in Pennsylvania, coming up next week.  People feel strongly about the subject and the rules have changed and I think will continue to change. 

But, the point is, we’re having a debate in our system of constitutional democracy on what we think about abortion.  In the meantime, in the international sphere, every time there’s a document that comes up, whether it’s on the environment, or trade, or the occupied territories in the Middle East, somehow the subject of reproductive health finds its way into it, and we’re into an incredibly, at least for me, an incredibly arcane discussion about verbal formulations that are really about abortion.  They may sound like they’re about equality of the sexes, or they may sound like they’re about reproductive health, but, I’ll guarantee you, if you dig down into the archeology of the various phrases that are being used, they’re fundamentally about whether you want to legitimize abortion.

Now, as I say, I’m not hear to argue one side of the abortion debate or another, but, I do think that endless discussions in U.N. institutions about reproductive health in the Israeli occupied territories is not really a very positive way to spend our time, either with respect to the Middle East, or with respect to the abortion debate. 

The second issue where this comes up very frequently is the death penalty.  Now, once again, in the United States we have a vigorous, active democratic debate about the death penalty at the federal and the state level.  I’m not here to argue one side or the other of that position, but I am here to argue that in our system we’ll decide whether we have the death penalty or no, and the constant repetitious adoption of resolutions first in the U.N. Human Rights Commission, now in its inadequate replacement, isn’t, I think, a legitimate exercise of time and attention in the U.N. system. 

There was a very revealing example of this early in Ban Ki-moon’s tenure where asked about the application of the death penalty he said, obviously naively, well that’s a matter for the member governments to take up.  I think he said it because as a former foreign minister of South Korea he’s well aware that South Korea has the death penalty.  The U.N. bureaucracy reacted with horror at such a statement because, after all, the U.N. has passed on this question many times, and has said that the death penalty is a no-no.  So he retreated and acknowledged that indeed that was the position of the United Nations. 

Now, I would ask you, even in forum, like, the general assembly or the human rights commission, or any other forum where there’s no veto, how anybody realistically can believe that the United Nations can have a position on an issue like that when we’re debating it in a democracy.  If you think that the votes of the majorities that made up the anti-death penalty resolutions somehow have more legitimacy internationally, or in this country, than our own democratic system, I would welcome you standing up and saying that.  I would ask further what it is that makes anybody think that this use of the U.N. system for this purpose is really going to have any global norming effect other than by the ceaseless repetition that finally wears people down.  I suggest to you that Global Governance Watch is not going to be worn down, even if the Human Rights Council passes another resolution that says it doesn’t like the death penalty. 

The third example deals with gun control, and we’ve seen, just in the life of this Administration, a number of efforts by American advocates of gun control to use the existence of an international problem, illicit trafficking in a variety of weapons, to try and adopt a gun control agenda through the U.N.  The theory basically is that if they could get some kind of international convention on gun control adopted that the Senate would ratify it and then the debate would be over.  It came up in the context of what are called a number of conferences on small arms and light weapons around the world in conflict zones.  Let me say, that starts the debate off already in a loaded fashion because small arms and light weapons by definition included everything from a .45 caliber revolver to crew served mortars.  I’m a strong believer in the Second Amendment, but, I think that even that doesn’t preclude the government from banning the use of crew served mortars in your backyard.  When you lump it altogether, mortar, fire, .45 caliber revolver practice, it all sort of looks the same. 

I thought that this was a mistake when I first came across this issue in 2001 when I was in charge of arms control, which is how I got into the small arms and light weapons business, and I volunteered, indeed I was eager to go to New York to give the U.S. address at the opening session of the U.N. conference on small arms and light weapons.  I said that while we certainly had a legitimate national interest in illicit trafficking and in various kinds of weapons, particularly in the conflict zones where they could be used against American deployed forces, that I didn’t think that the conference should really spend its time on issues that were within the domestic purview of the member governments.  And I said particularly in the case of the United States we have a provision of the Constitution, which, Attorney General John Ashcroft had recently opined on, was a matter of individual right and was not something that was a collective right as many had advocated, and that therefore I made the following revolutionary statement in the general assembly.  We would not support any declaration or international convention, which, if adopted as positive law in the United States, would be unconstitutional.  Well, I mean, you would have thought that I had said something really objectionable.  And, indeed, I had, because that undercut the fundamental political agenda of those who thought that that was precisely the purpose of this conference, to adopt statements or to lead to a convention that would ultimately constrain the United States in its domestic law. 

Now, again, this is an issue on which reasonable people can disagree, we’ll see soon whether the Supreme Court agrees with that Attorney General opinion from seven years ago.  But one has to wonder why it is that people think international norming on this issue is somehow preferable to the playing out of our democratic system.  And this, to me, is where you get really to the nub of what sovereignty is all about.  Sovereignty is not some abstract concept to Americans.  It’s not something held by a distant government.  It’s not something that actually we view as deriving from kings anymore.  For us, in this country, we are sovereign, we govern ourselves, we determine what our government will do. 

So when you talk about breaking sovereignty down or sharing sovereignty with somebody else or the limits of sovereignty, you’re saying to us that we don’t know how to govern ourselves effectively, and that a little less self-government would be good for us.  Well, I fundamentally disagree.  I think the vast majority of American citizens disagree.  I’d love to have a debate in this political campaign.  I’d love to have a debate in this political campaign about global governance and shared sovereignty.  I don’t know whether we will or not, but I think this joint AEI/Federalist Society project will go a long way toward encouraging that debate.  Thank you very much.  [Applause]. 

 Danielle Pletka:  John has agreed to take a couple of questions before he has to take off, so, let me open the floor.  If everybody would just be kind enough, David, do we have a microphone here, to identify yourself, please. 

 Ambassador John R. Bolton:  Go ahead, let’s go ahead and start, I’ll repeat the question if people can’t hear it.  Go ahead, yes sir, you. 

 Male Audience Member:  Mr. Ambassador, Cuba has had a longstanding very sophisticated biotechnology program.  There were defective reports that they may have been working on biological weapons, and of course the defense against those, which is permitted, is the same process to create the weapons or the diseases themselves.  So, why would this be seen as controversial within the State Department, or any intelligence service of the United States? 

 Ambassador John R. Bolton:  Well, having generated, this is a question about Cuba and its BW research.  Brett Schaeffer from the Heritage Foundation is here, welcome.  I said at Heritage in 2003 that Cuba had a research and development program in BW capabilities and that the Cubans had a lot of contacts with other rogue states that we feared had more advanced programs.  To Senator Dodd, Castro’s chief defender in the Senate, this became a matter of grave concern during my confirmation battle.  All I can say is, I don’t really understand why it was so controversial since the Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research had used exactly the same sentence that I used in my Heritage speech and testimony on the Hill a month before and nobody had picked that up.  So, this is a kind of subject that I’d love to discuss further, but maybe another time. 

 Roger Trig [ph.]:  My name is Roger Trig from the University of Oxford in England.  I would accept everything you say when it applies to democracies, but when we look at a country like Zimbabwe it’s quite tempting to think, if only we could apply some kind of international accepted norms on what’s going on there.  So how would you approach that kind of situation? 

 Ambassador John R. Bolton:  Well, let me take Zimbabwe or Burma as good examples.  One might take up the question of the situation in Zimbabwe or Burma in the U.N. human rights decision-making body, the U.N. Human Rights Council.  This would be an essentially futile task.  The reason for that is that the Commission, and now its latter day descendent, the Council, spend most of their time protecting the grossest abusers of human rights from real scrutiny, and when they’re not occupied in that important task, attacking Israel or the United States.  That’s just not my opinion.  I’m either profoundly happy or profoundly concerned that my view that the Human Rights Council is as bad or worse than its predecessor is shared by The New York Times and The Washington Post. 

 Professor Gerarda Cullifer [ph.]:  Thank you Ambassador Bolton.  My name is Professor Gerarda Cullifer, and I’m a Roman Catholic professor of law at American University, so I am God-fearing.  My question goes to strategy in terms of communicating to my students who are all international LM candidates, they’re all international lawyers, and we were discussing the Medienne [ph.] case, which came out about a month ago.  Fundamentally my students don’t accept the separation of powers, which is what protects our country from the imposition of international customary law on us.  How do you encourage us to engage in debate with you and even old international lawyers who fundamentally do not accept our construct of government?  How do we communicate with people who fundamentally don’t accept the structure of our country? 

 Ambassador John R. Bolton:  Let me ask that a different way, how do they communicate with us?  My point is that when you get into one of these conversations about our differences with other countries and the broader subject of American exceptionalism, we’re not advocating that they have to adopt our practices.  If they don’t want to have a separation of executive from judicial power, if they don’t have a division of power between national and subdivision levels, if they don’t want to put in place all the protections we have that are there not because they are aesthetically pleasing, but because we believe fundamentally they help protect our basic liberties, they don’t want to do any of that, that’s fine.  That’s fine.  But, it’s not, that doesn’t give them license to come after us.  The argument that somehow Texas has responsibilities that are different from the Federal Government, that that’s a sneaky way around international obligation is just factually incorrect, and reverses the logic of why the division between national and state power exist.  I’m not sure there is an answer to your question other than continually trying to explain why we do things the way we do and in hopes that others will understand it.  But their lack of understanding of what we do is not a reason for us not to do it.  I think.  Thank you all very much.  [Applause]. 

 Danielle Pletka:  I know we’re running a little bit late, but, I think it was worth it to take the extra time to hear from John.  I’m going to invite David and Alyssa up to the podium, and what they’re going to do is just very quickly layout for you the new website, which I think is a piece of marvelous work, and I hope will be used by all present and many others as well.  So, over to you two for a quick review, thank you both. 

 David Peyton:  Thank you, Dani.  Thanks to Ambassador Bolton for his participation in the event today.  We’d like to take a minute or two to present to you the website that we’ve been working on for the past several months, which will be a part of this Global Governance Watch project. 

Global Governance Watch, as previously stated, falls on the heels of a previous and smaller AEI/Federalist Society project called NGO Watch, the purpose of which was to monitor issues of transparency and accountability in NGOs and a few other international organizations.  Global Governance Watch builds on the work of NGO Watch by expanding the scope of the project to the United Nations, to international financial institutions, and other international regulators that have contributed to the growing Global Governance Watch movement.  The GGW mission statement is to promote transparency, accountability, and national sovereignty, and we hope that this website and future GGW events will provide a useful forum for discussing these issues. 

GGW, or, Global Governance Watch, divides its work into four content areas, or, pillars, as we call them.  These pillars seek to divide global governance into manageable parts that can be digested by the public.  The four pillars are:  development; national security; human security; and global regulation.  Now, the first pillar, which I’ll describe, development, looks at international organizations that conduct development work, the strategies they employ, their efficacy, or lack thereof, and the agendas that they promote.  A few of the organizations that we’ll be looking at include the UNDP, the Millennium Development Goals, the World Bank, and NGOs. 

The second pillar that we’ll be looking at is called national security, which looks at international organizations that have become increasingly involved in national defense policy.  The focus areas under this pillar include arms control, nonproliferation and peacekeeping. 

I’ll now turn the mic over to Alyssa who will describe the remaining two pillar areas. 

Alyssa Luttjohann:  Sure, thank you, David.  The third pillar we are looking at is human security.  This looks at the changing definition of human security from simply one of freedom from fear to also one that includes freedom from want, and then what that means for national sovereignty.  Some of the focus areas we’re looking at include the international covenant on civil and political rights, the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights, and U.N. enforcement. 

The fourth pillar is global regulation.  This looks at international networks that are being used to globally regulate economic and social affairs and the effects this has on national sovereignty.  Some of our focus areas are climate change regulation, health and intellectual property, and corporate social responsibility. 

I want to click through one of the pillars for you real quickly, just so you can see how to navigate around.  You can get to any of the pillars from the home page.  When you click on it, it brings you to a brief overview of the pillar, you can then move on to the focus areas.  There are several different focus areas that you can choose from, anything you want to learn more about.  I’ll click on one for you.  And then this goes into some foundational content of what that issue looks at.  All of these, the pillar content, have links within them, so if there’s something you find more interesting and want to learn more about it, you can just keep clicking through. 

We also have, two of the other main features of the website include our recent development sections and then also our resources section.  The recent developments frame current events within the paradigm of global governance, and as the ideas and the processes of global governance develop, we’ll update the foundational content.  It’s going to be a very current resource. 

The second is our resources section.  The foundational content of the pillars, and also the recent developments, like I said, link to many original source documents, analyses, organizational websites and articles, and all of these are compiled in this section.  This is sort of a library of sorts.  The resources section is fully searchable by author, title, category and publication date, making it a very valuable resource. 

David Peyton:  If you’d like to personalize your GGW viewing experience, you can set up a my GGW account, which allows you to subscribe to our bi-weekly mailing, which will be coming out, and, also, if you’d like to specify the particular pillar areas that you’re interested in our mailings will correspond to those particular areas, and you can receive those to your email. 

Alyssa Luttjohann:  And then we, David and I, appreciate any feedback or comments that you have as you’re going through the website.  You can feel free to contact us.  We’ll be around after the panel discussion, which is going to start in just a minute, and then also our contact information is on the Global Governance Watch information sheet that you can find in your blue folders.  So, thank you very much. 

David Peyton:  Thank you. 

 Danielle Pletka:  I think we’re going to move to our next panel.  If I can invite our panelists up to the podium, Alyssa and David, thank you very much for that presentation, and, off we go. 

 James P. Kelly:  Thank you very much.  My name is Jim Kelly, I’m the Director of International Affairs for the Federalist Society.  And, again, I’d like to thank Alyssa Luttjohann and David Peyton for the excellent work that they’ve been doing in creating Global Governance Watch.  They did a terrific job and I know it’ll be a useful resource. 

 In your blue packet are the biographies of the three panelists.  If you please make reference to that, I would appreciate it.  I will quickly go through them in the interest of making sure you know who is going to be speaking today.  We have with us first, on the far end, Honorable Ronald A. Cass, he’s the chairman of the Center for the Rule of Law and the president of Cass & Associates.  He serves as an international arbiter in NAFTA, ICSID, UNCITRAL and AAA cases.  He served under President Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as vice chairman and commissioner of the International Trade Commission.  Mr. Cass is dean emeritus of the Boston University School of Law and was the Melville Madison Bigelow Professor of Law from 1995 to 2004.  He’s chairman, I’m proud to say, of our Federalist Society Practice Group on International Law and National Security.  You can read about his publications in his biography. 

 Next we have Claudia Rosett.  Claudia is a journalist and resident at the Foundation for Defensive Democracies.  She writes on international affairs.  Ms. Rosett regularly writes for publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard.  Her work on exposing the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal earned her the 2005 Eric Breindel Award and the Mightier Pen Award.  Ms. Rosett has served as a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board in New York from 1997 to 2002 and was bureau chief in the journal’s Moscow bureau between 1993 and 1996. 

 We have with us also Ambassador Joseph Rees.  He is the special representative for social issues in the International Organizations Bureau at the Department of State.  From January 2001 until December 2002, he served as counsel to the Committee on International Relations of the U.S. House of Representatives. He served as general counsel for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1991 until 1993 and as chief justice of the High Court of American Samoa between 1986 and 1991. 

 We have asked these three panelists to speak on the issue of global governance, and we’ve asked them to speak in the context of three of our four pillar areas.  What I would like to do is read the statements that we have presented to them.  This was to provide context for the remarks.  They will not be necessarily speaking directly to or answering the questions raised in what we provided to them.  Hopefully they will amplify it with their terrific experiences in the area of global governance. 

 I’m going to start with Ambassador Rees, who is going to be discussing, generally, the issue of human security.  We informed Ambassador Rees, historically the realization of civil and human rights has taken place organically within sovereign nation states.  While progress is slow, there is much that is gained from allowing democratic processes to play out in terms of legislative, judicial and executive action.  However, in recent years, human rights activists have been aggressively promoting economic and social human rights that are theoretical in nature, and not clearly established in national or international law.  These include such rights as the right to health, the right to work, the right to water, the right to housing and the right to education.  To aggravate the situation, in two recent cases as partial justification for its decisions, the Supreme Court of the United States cited decisions of the European Court of Human Rights.  Two U.N. organizations are formally involved in promoting human rights, the Geneva-based U.N. office of the High Commission for Human Rights, and the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, yet the United States has no effective control over the programs or the work of these two organizations, much of which takes place outside the context of the infrequent meetings of their member states. 

 Ambassador Rees, what, if anything, could the United States Department of State and Congress do to prevent the unaccountable expansion of the U.N. Secretary’s activities in the area of economic and social human rights?  Thank you. 

 Ambassador Grover Joseph Rees:  Thank you, Jim.  I had prepared a few remarks, and, of course, one of the problems you always have at a multi-speaker event is that you will have prepared things to say that someone will say before you.  So, I wasn’t too disturbed when Ambassador Bolton began by talking about the similarities between some of the issues involved in the growth of international law and similar issues in the growth of, or, distortion of American constitutional law.  I figured I could work around that. 

 The main point I was going to make after I made that point was that international organizations are very good, particularly in the social and human rights area, in recognizing whether or not we agree with the results that they reach sometimes, and we often don’t; it’s fundamentally good that there exists multilateral organizations that recognize that fundamental human rights don’t come from governments.  What we need to do is get them to take the next step and get them to recognize that those rights also don’t come from international organizations. 

 The universal Declaration of Human Rights speaks of natural human rights that are inherent in human personality, and I think our own Declaration of Independence said it even better, which is that we are endowed by our creator, with certain inalienable rights.  But, Ambassador Bolton covered that too.  I figured he’d at least leave me the abortion issue, as the particular bailiwick of the social and human rights area.  So, I’m going to work around as best I can.  I’m afraid all that’s left are the war stories. 

 I had the privilege of being, I have been, as Jim said, I’ve been special representative for social issues, which, of course, in the United States it means you’re against gay marriage, in the United Nations context, social issue is very broad and includes the whole human rights field, as well as women’s issues, children’s issues, a lot of development issues.  I have been working both to make United Nations, working on behalf of the President and the Secretary of State, to deliver our message, which President Bush calls the Human Dignity Agenda, which is that the United Nations, which doesn’t only govern, it’s also supposed to do things, it has programs, and a lot of our message is to try to get the programmatic areas of the United Nations that are designed to help vulnerable people to actually go out and help them instead of creating new norms and instead of having workshops or perhaps in addition. 

 Our message is, more immunizations, fewer workshops, few new norms.  Well, for three months in fall, I got to go to the place where it all hits the road, which is the General Assembly.  I was acting representative to the Economic and Social Council, and, also, therefore, to the Committees, the second and third committees which deal with economic and social issues.  The things that Ambassador Bolton was talking about, you give notional assent to them, but you can’t really give real assent to them until you get there and you realize that every single day, I don’t think there was a day, in a way the abortion issue was the easiest because we’d been through it so many times that you could look at the language and know that if it said reproductive health services, the United States was going to have to vote against; if it said reproductive health, we could vote for it, but we had to have an explanation of position, that reproductive health doesn’t include abortion.  And if it said reproductive health care, then it was okay because there was a meeting once where they decided that reproductive health care, or a series of meetings, didn’t include abortion.  So that one at least we had a formula on.

 The problem is that the gold standard in U.N. social issues discussions is agreed language, and they have so many, so many fora, and so many meetings of every forum, that it’s almost impossible for anything we don’t like to miss out on having been agreed language somewhere.  And, so, constantly, when we would say, no, we can’t agree to that language, we were told, no, but it’s agreed language, it was in 2005 at the World Summit on this -- actually, the 2005 one is simply called the World Summit -- wasn’t on anything, but there were other world summits on particular things, and, so, then you’d have to go back to the negotiating history, and, sure enough, it was agreed language.  If you said, but, we shouldn’t have agreed to that language, it’s not right, that was not an argument that was appreciated.  And, on the other hand, it’s like American constitutional law in that it’s a ratchet. 

 The people who are promoting new human rights that couldn’t get voted in most countries are allowed to go beyond the agreed language, and that’s seen as progress.  They got the agreed language last year, what they need now is just a couple of extra words to really tamp it down.  Everyone understands that that’s going on.  Whereas when the United States says, as we have occasionally said, no, we’ve thought about it, and we don’t like what you’re doing with that agreed language from 2005 or 2006, that is, it’s not just impolite, it’s nearly unpardonable. 

 We’ve got allies on all of these issues, but they’re different allies, and they’re two dramatically different sets of allies on the two basic things we try to do.  What we try to do in the human rights area in the U.N. is simple, we try to get these institutions, the Human Rights Council, which we don’t have much luck with, The Third Committee, which is the social committee of the U.N. General Assembly, we have a little more luck with, we try to get them to recognize and promote real human rights, the right not to be tortured, the right not to be imprisoned for your political opinions, the right against extrajudicial execution, the right to freedom of religion, freedom of expression.  We try to get them to promote those rights, and to identify violations of those rights, and to at least say bad things about the governments that are violating those rights.  And then we try to get them not to create and promote in the rubric of human rights things that really aren’t human rights.  That’s pretty simple. 

Well, we have one set of allies on the first question, and we’re talking about Burma and Zimbabwe and what happens in Darfur and a few other places like that, and we usually, by the skin of our teeth, we can pass country specific resolutions in the Third Committee, usually pretty good, tough resolutions, calling attention to the problems in these countries.  Our allies tend to be the European Union, which, in addition to its 27 votes, has about 15, 16, 17 other countries that are candidate countries that in other ways associate themselves.  They come with a good chunk of votes, and they’re good on the country specific resolutions. 

On other issues, the fighting of new non-human rights, of the tendency to turn every last one of our political opinions, or of their political opinions into human rights, we have a different set of allies.  On those issues, we find that some Latin American countries, some African countries, some Islamic countries, generally, although abortion is not the only one of these issues, it’s the same countries where you would find that the country still has laws protecting its unborn children, those are the same countries on which you can get them on your side against creating new human rights.  The problem is that often our allies on each set of issues, while they care about those issues, and they’re genuinely on our side, they don’t care as much about those issues as they do about something else, about process, about precedent, this agreed language issue frequently loses its allies, about some other fish they’ve got to fry or they’re going to need the other side.

So, we haven’t always been able to build the coalitions.  Occasionally it happens.  There was the cloning resolution in 2004 and 2005 where part of the advantage was it wasn’t originally proposed by us, it was proposed by Costa Rica, and it was to ban all human cloning, to recommend that all governments ban all human cloning.  Well, some European countries disagreed, and they proposed a counterproposal that would ban reproductive cloning, but not what they called research cloning.  What it boiled down to was it would be okay to clone as long as you killed the resulting entity a few weeks or months later.  Well, that was unacceptable to us, and it was unacceptable to much of the Islamic world and many of the African countries and many of the Latin American countries.  So, eventually, we got about a 2 to 1 vote with a lot of abstentions in favor of that anti-cloning resolution.  But, we have not always been able to replicate that result. 

Similarly, on the human rights issues, we did pass resolutions in the fall condemning human rights violations in Iran, in Belarus, in Burma, and in North Korea, but, we didn’t even try Zimbabwe, Sudan or Cuba, because the vote count, well, for a number of reasons, you can’t do too many, but, one of the concerns was that the votes might have been different on those. 

I just want to close with one observation, going back to the question of the U.S. Constitution.  The reason we do believe that it’s good for the United Nations to concern itself with genuine human rights questions is the same reason we have a Constitution.  If we were going to be a pure democracy we wouldn’t need a constitution.  It’s that we recognize, and we did so democratically when we adopted the Constitution; that there ought to be some limits on what even democracy can do at the moment.  At the same time, human rights law, or, international human rights law, human rights norms, recognize that there are some things, again, which, in here, in our nature as human beings, and which governments don’t have the right to take away from us.  That’s good.  But, as some of us said when we were considering the Rome statute of the international criminal court, we’ll agree to it if you can come up with a court that can definitely try Pol Pot and definitely can’t try Jesse Helms.  Somehow the United Nations often seems on the verge of coming up with the opposite.  We’ve got our work cut out for us.  I thank you for listening.  [Applause]. 

 James P. Kelly:  Thank you, Joseph.  What we’re going to do is hear from each of the panelists, and then we’ll come back and take your questions after all three have spoken.  I’m going to next ask our panelist, Ron Cass.  The statement that he was given for the context of his remarks:  over the past few years, the United Nations has sought to serve as the lead organization for addressing such issues as climate change, migration, health, education, the eradication of extreme poverty, and human rights.  In support of these efforts, the U.N. has created a matrix of regional and international networks consisting of non-governmental organizations, academics, transnational businesses and foundations.  These networks include research networks, policy networks, standard setting networks, legislative networks, enforcement networks, and funding networks, yet the U.N. member states have little, if any, input regarding the nature and agendas of the participants in these networks. 

 Ron, what, if anything, can the United States Department of State and Congress do either to prevent the delusion of the U.N. as purely a member state organization, or, if partnerships are inevitable, to increase the transparency and accountability of the U.N.’s network partners?  Thanks. 

 Ronald A. Cass:  Well, thank you, Jim.  Having heard all the cell phones going off during a couple of the prior speakers, I have to start with one brief anecdote.  I was, about a month ago, in a steam room, and, while there, a cell phone went off, and one of the fellows in the steam room picked it up, and answered the phone, where are you?  At the club.  The voice on the other end, said, well, maybe this is a bad time to ask, but, at Garden House Furs there was a mink on sale that I wanted, it’s only $5,000, can I get it?  There was a pause, the fellow said yes.  And then the voice on the other end said, well, I also went by the Mercedes dealership, European motors, and I noticed that the S500 I wanted, they have one in just the color I want, they have it marked down, it’s only $90,000.  Can I get that?  There was a longer pause, and the fellow said yes.  And then the conversation went on, well, maybe this is really not the right time to ask, but, I also was reading the ads on the Internet and saw an apartment in Paris for only $3M, it’s right on the Champs-Ėlysėes, these come on the market so rarely, do you think I could put a bid in on that?  There was a much longer pause, and then, yes.  The conversation closed with a lot of complimentary remarks, and, see you tonight, fellow hung up the phone, turned to the rest of the people in the room and said, whose phone is this?  [Laughter]. 

Now, when you deal with the U.N., this is a question you have to ask a lot, because it’s very easy to say yes to all sorts of wonderful things when you’re not playing with your own money.  When we start with the United States, we start with the proposition that our founding, that the base of our Constitution is human, individual freedom.  We’re going to move from human freedom to certain agreements that constrain our freedom, that give power over to government.  We’re going to do that voluntarily and we’re going to do it democratically, but we’re going to do it where it makes sense to us, where we need to make some compromise on our individual freedom so that we can get a greater good.  The Constitution does this by looking at the sort of issues that we need government to solve, and what level of government we need to solve it at. 

There’s also a lot of attention to the fact that even after striking those agreements we have to worry about what individuals are going to do and what groups of individuals are going to do when they don’t want something that will serve the common good, when they want something that advances their own particular interest and agenda. 

If you go back to the Federalist Papers, you read Hamilton in Federalist 9, Madison in Federalist 10, a writing about the problem of faction, how we’re going to resolve that, what level of government is the right level of government to make decisions at.  For most sorts of decisions that we need to have made about our lives we can make it individually.  We can make it through the market.  We can make it through individual negotiations and dealings. 

There’s another level of decisions we need to make at a local level, and then there’s decisions we need to make at a national level.  We’ve seated a certain measure of individual freedom to make those decisions at a national level.  Rarely there are decisions that have to be made at an international level. 

Back in the 1850s a group of countries negotiated the way they would interconnect lines so we could send telegraph messages across national borders.  You need to have that, and you need to have agreement on that the same way if you’re driving from Washington up to Boston you don’t want to be going, driving on the left part of the time, on the right part of the time.  I heard somebody trying to explain the way you make these decisions, by saying we’re going to go from left-hand drive to right-hand drive in a certain country, but we’re going to do it for a certain part of the population one day, another part of the population the next.  You just can’t do things that way.  You need agreement on certain ground rules. 

Where we are today with the U.N. is not getting agreement on the rules of the road, but on what car you ought to be driving, what fuel you ought to be using, what ought to be in and who ought to be traveling with you, whether you like it or not.  And we’ve gone from doing that at a level where nations have to agree, to now doing it at a level where we have a combination of nations, and, as Jim said, not only nations, but cross-border organizations, organizations that purport to represent particular interests. 

Now, there’s a certain level at which we want people who are stakeholders, we want people who are interested in international regulation participating, we want the businesses that are being regulated participating, we want the people who are being regulated participating.  We want to know the information they have before we strike agreements even on things where we need international agreement.  But the way to do it legitimately is to do it through representative governments, to do it through your government, to have the businesses and the individuals who are affected deal with the government and let the government negotiate the result.  Sometimes when you do that, you get results you don’t like.  It’s a messy process. 

I was a dean of a law school for 14 years, that drives home to you, more than anything else, the limits of your power to get people to do what they ought to do.  I was dealing with a faculty of people who had lifetime tenure.  It’s hard to get them to do what you want them to do no matter what you say.  When you deal with sovereign nations, it’s hard to get them to do what you want them to do, which is why we negotiate, why we have agreements.  Today, we’re in the process of subverting agreements that have already been made and making new rules for agreements we haven’t yet struck. 

One of the things that was talked about earlier was the World Trade Organization.  The World Trade Organization has certain rules that are adopted, and those are negotiated among countries.  Among the rules that have been negotiated are rules for trade in goods that have intellectual property embodied in them.  So, if you were selling a disc that has a movie on it that has a copyright, or you were selling a CD that has a record on it that has a copyright, or you were selling a pharmaceutical that has a patent on it, or a product that has a trademark on it, we have rules that are agreed for protecting the intellectual property, and that encourages people to invest in inventing new drugs and creating new movies and doing all the sorts of things we want people to be doing. 

Well, those rules for protecting intellectual property internationally aren’t congenial to people who don’t want to protect intellectual property.  There are people who want to steal the intellectual property of others and use it for their own goods.  Now some of the people who want to do this will be speaking in the name of human health.  They want to take pharmaceuticals and not pay patent royalties because they want to give drugs out for free to everybody, they don’t think ahead to who creates the next drug. 

But other people want it because it advances their own particular business agenda or because they simply don’t like property rights, generally they want to break down the system.  Those people have a voice in trying to get their individual governments to renegotiate deals like the trade related aspects of intellectual property deal for the WTO.  When you can’t do that, though, what do you do?  You try to get some other international organization to adopt a set of principles that contradicts the ones that were negotiated by your government.  And we see that going on with the World Health Organization, which has a working group made up of people that are not all representatives of government that is trying now to undo some of the agreements made elsewhere by governments that deal directly with intellectual property rights. 

We ought to have an ability, as a nation, to say, here are the deals we’re not going to respect, here are the deals we’re going to abide by, and if we have organizations that are starting to break down the ability of sovereign nations to only be bound by things they agree to, we can stop funding those organizations, we can cut back our funding of those organizations, we can vote for restructuring. 

A lot of the time we need to be sensitive to the fact that it’s good to have attention called to what different international players are doing.  Sometimes we have too many decision-makers with too many contrary decisions, and we ought to try to get them together to negotiate a single set of rules.  Again, I go back to the international telecommunications union and its origins, there are times when a single set of rules makes sense, but, for those occasions, we ought to have it done in a transparent accountable way that respects national sovereignty.  We ought to make sure that whenever these things are being done that the person who is answering the cell phone is the one that’s going to be paying the bill.  [Applause]. 

 James P. Kelly:  Thanks very much, Ron, and I appreciate that you ended your remarks with the issue of transparency and accountability, because that brings us to Claudia’s contextual question regarding the development pillar of Global Governance Watch.  Claudia, as has been well-documented, as you have well-documented, the United Nations is met with much deserved criticism in the management or mismanagement of the U.N. office of the Iraq Oil-for-Food program.  Additionally, in 2005, the World Bank’s Department of Institutional Integrity issued a 16-page report that documented systemic fraud and corruption in the pharmaceutical drug procurement practices in the Bank’s Reproductive and Child Health One Project in India.  In 2007, the World Bank published a detailed implementation review of the India health sector, a forensic examination undertaken by the World Bank’s Department of Institutional Integrity that identified corruption in the administration of loans relating to five health projects in India.  In both the case of the U.N. and World Bank corruption scandals, Paul Volcker was hired to investigate the systemic failings in the Oil-for-Food and Department of Institutional Integrity programs, and make recommendations for improvement. 

 In light of these egregious shortcomings in the administration of humanitarian and development aid, is it realistic to presume that the U.N., World Bank, and other super national development agencies can establish the degree of transparency and accountability necessary to fight corruption within the management of their aid programs, and within the governments of their aid recipients? 

 Claudia Rosett:  Well, okay, where to begin with this?  Just two quick notes, on Paul Volcker, had he actually put more effort into investigating and clarifying the extent of the wrongdoing under Oil-for-Food we might have stopped a great many more things, and learned more, in time, to do something about it, and still be doing something now.  Case in point, you remember Benon Sevan, who ran Oil-for-Food, who’s been living as a fugitive from U.S. law on Cyprus, who left New York quietly, and, I suspect, on the ticket of the U.N.  In the spring of 2005 while the Volcker inquiry was going on, assuring the press that if there was any problem we would hear about it, he’s now writing in The Armenian Daily online.  You can look him up, opining about the rotation out of the U.N. special representative, his buddy, Michael Muller [ph.] from Cyprus.  I find it fascinating that you can have the United Nations, a global institution, with all these global aspirations, and yet here’s somebody who has been indicted in New York, accused of wrongdoing by their own investigation, and he’s out there with his opinions going online from Cyprus, living a live unfettered as long as he sits on the island. 

 Okay, with that, I could come here today and do something I did recently, somewhat to my regret, I sat down with a group of people in Washington who wanted to hear about the U.N. and I went into a list of scandals.  Because, I could sit here and do this for the next week solid, we could go around the clock, and I could list for you sort of various things coming off of Oil-for-Food, the peacekeeper rape scandals, the procurement bribery scandals, the cash-for-Kim, UNDP scandals, the moral bankruptcy, the failures to solve the real crises of the world, the creation of artificial crises, I would class climate change in that category, the whimsical tendency of Russian officials to corrupt Russian officials to name their offshore front companies after their children.  We could do this, and your eyes would start to glaze over, and you would start to think this is all really very large and unmanageable and I can’t keep track of anything, and she’s going to spaghetti, who can follow, and, anyway, nothing really seems to come of it, and we’re all still here hail and hearty, so what’s the problem?  And you go home thinking, oh my my, that was a really depressing thing that got said about the U.N., whatever it all was.  Oil-for-Food was corrupt, I remember that.  And, we could do this again and again. 

 So, instead, I want to just skip, I’m happy to answer questions on any of the things I’ve just mentioned, including this tendency to name the front companies after the kids, which is just the beginning of a whole whimsical underworld of U.N. sleaze corruption and moral bankruptcy, and we are talking about the U.N. when we talk about global governance.  But let’s skip to a more basic point, which is, why does this keep happening, and, is there actually any way that we can stop it? 

 The answer is that it keeps happening, the things you just reeled off, the things I could reel off, the things from my colleagues who cover the U.N. could reel off, it keeps happening because the United Nations is designed for this to happen, and there is actually nothing to, given the way that the U.N. is set up, there is nothing that is going to stop it from happening because the U.N. will morph and adapt to continue.  It’s what it’s designed to do.  The basic reason, the U.N. is fundamentally unaccountable.  It doesn’t report to anybody. 

 When you began telling your joke about the cell phone, I thought, is that Kofi Annan calling?  But, it could be Ban Ki-moon these days, with his climate change conferences on Bali, it could be Kemal Dervis at the U.N. Development Program, which operates around the world and nobody, even on the governing executive board, gets to see their own audits.  And there have been endless efforts to make it accountable over the years.  U.N. reform, when Condi Rice said, a continuing revolution of reform, I thought, yah, sort of like, they’ve been trying to institute global socialism since whenever, this endless.  There was something called the Joint Inspections Unit that’s been around for decades that’s supposed to provide oversight.  In 1998, the United States, feeling that that was not doing the job, set-up the office of Internal Oversight Services, they are external auditors, internal auditors, it doesn’t actually, the Oil-for-Food program was, and I’m quoting the Secretary General spokesman, audited to death, it doesn’t actually do the job it can because the U.N. doesn’t account to anybody. 

 In this country we have a system of checks and balances where, in the end, watch them slugging it out in the primaries right now, politicians, love them or hate them, have to account to people who go with their votes to the ballot box.  They are also accountable in the courts if need be.  These are checks and balances that actually check and balance.  At the U.N. what you have is a sort of Orwellian replication of the labels, but there’s no checking and balancing.  They, in fact, do not, in the end, account to voters.  They account to this bizarre eschewed system in which money pours in, basically from the democratic countries of the world, and the majority of the so-called voting decisions are made by countries that don’t supply the money, that don’t subscribe to the same principles, the governments that don’t -- when I say countries, please read that to mean the governments of these countries -- and there is actually no place where, finally, the buck stops. 

 In fact, I would suggest that if we’re talking about the U.N. is a seed of global governance, the only conceivable way in which that might lend itself to any system that you would ever want to live under would be if we had already colonized Mars, Neptune, Pluto and possibly galaxies beyond, because you need someplace you can go to get away from this.  You need a place of competition.  The essence of good government, of progress, of just about everything that works in the world is competition, and, the U.N. thrust toward deciding sort of what people should do, getting people to sign on to these consensus, that’s always the big U.N. word, consensus treaties, arrangements, regulations, the conferences, the endless things that John Bolton was talking about that emanate from the United Nations is that all authority goes to this sort of amorphous unaccountable mess. 

 Ask, who does the U.N. answer to?  The Secretary General in theory answers to the General Assembly.  The General Assembly is 192 member states.  Who are they accountable to?  Who stands up and, there is no there there.  What went on under Oil-for-Food, what went on under Cash-for-Kim, what goes on endlessly is you point to some specific piece of wrongdoing, and that part of the U.N. points to another part of the U.N., and that points to another one, until it’s lost in the echo chamber because there is no single jurisdiction that holds the U.N. to account.  It operates across borders, and, you can chase down some things done in the U.S. in U.S. courts.  Has anybody seen any cases prosecuted out of Nairobi on U.N. corruption recently?  Out of Moscow?  Or out of some of the other places where they keep some of their big offices and programs?  Out of Vienna?  It just doesn’t happen, it’s virtually impossible, and, if it did, you would have to start worrying because not all legal systems operate to the kind of standard that we expect in a democratic state. 

 Basically what we’re talking about is, it’s hard to, given the horrors that attended upon central planning in the last century, it’s hard to see how anyone could make it worse.  But the U.N. offers a recipe for actually making that worse.  At least the Soviet central planners were stuck with the Soviet empire.  They, in the end, that’s what did them in.  This is, sort of what the U.N. keeps moving toward, and if it sounds overwrought to say this, it actually is not, that would be the days I could recite for you of the conferences, the plans, the initiatives in which the metrics are not with us, in which things do start to get through, global warming, the whole climate change obsession would be a very, very good case in point. 

 But, you’re talking about global central planning in which there is sort of no one to account to, and as this system proceeds, as it becomes more marked, as they gain ground, they still have the resources of wealthy democratic states.  Those have to erode considerably before the U.N. will start to feel any real pinch.  And it no longer draws just on member dues.  One of the ways, since the Soviet collapse, since Kofi Annan went on his grand campaign to bring the private sector in, public private partnerships, the Ted Turner billion dollar gift, the setting up of a special department in the U.N. Secretariat to collect private donations, the endless campaigns on almost every front to tap into the global economy, its become more and more difficult to hold anything to account.  As the late representative Henry Hyde said, while investigating the system, he couldn’t even figure out the total size of the U.N. budget.  I was grateful to hear him say that because I’d been trying and I couldn’t either.  Upwards of $20 billion is the system-wide budget.  How much upwards, it’s not even clear that parts of the U.N. itself would know. 

 But, that’s the basic, basic problem, there is no accountability, and when you have power of any kind, money, political influence, power without accountability, you have a recipe for dictatorship, and that’s the sort of encroaching shadow here.  There was a great economist, many years deceased, Frank Knight [ph.], who said, I’m told said something which I’ve been trying to track down and I can’t find the precise quote, maybe he just said it in conversation at the University of Chicago Quadrangle Club, but, it rings very true.  He said, the thing with global governance organizations is they will start out seeking perfect justice, and they will end up destroying civilization.  That’s the trajectory. 

 Let me just give you one little sample.  The U.N. is full right now, it’s full of these global things.  We’re all worried about global warming, so there’s got to be a global solution, and global carbon, they have millennium development goals for the globe, for everybody, it’s all very grand.  Well, they also have something called the global compact, this was another Kofi Annan initiative, it actually operates effectively as the slush fund under the Secretary General where he can convene all the heads of Fortune 500 companies, big corporate interests from around the world, invite them to, as they did last year, a plush pow-wow in Geneva and get private pledges of money to the U.N., and this thing operates inside the Secretariat, in violation of many of the U.N.’s own rules, last time I researched and reported and wrote a story about it. 

 Okay, the global compact has ten principles of good governance, that’s my, I’m going to wrap it up with this, they had nine when they began, all about transparency, and all this, all these good things that we all subscribe to.  They added a tenth, sort of during the, as Oil-for-Food began to get big in the headlines, business should work against corruption in all its forms.  Include that at an anti-corruption thing. 

 They have a foundation, this global compact, which invites companies around the world to sign on and endorse their principles and endorse the U.N. and become part of the U.N. happy global compact family for good governance, they have a foundation in the United States, which invites your donations.  The foundation resides, as far as I can track down, in a post office box in Grand Central Station.  And it has a website.  You can Google it. 

 If you go into the U.N. procurement website you’ll see a global compact link there.  If you click on that you’ll get to the global compact with its principles.  This is just emblematic.  This is classic of virtually any rabbit hole you go down at the U.N.  They have a link on the website for this global compact foundation, which I’ve been watching for the past year and one-half.  It says, financial information, this is the U.N.’s big transparency promoting initiative, financial information, and it says that financial information will be posted on this site as available, routinely updated.   Here’s the page.  I don’t know if you can see this.  There’s been nothing on it since I began watching it in early 2007.  Nothing.  And that is accountability at the U.N.  It’s their talking on and on, exerting away, and when you actually go looking for, where are they themselves, in responsibility, that’s the answer. 

 It would be a, to continue along the line we are going with them is a very bad idea, creative ways of doing something about that would be a very good idea.  It’s difficult.  There are huge vested interests.  Thank you.  [Applause]. 

 James P. Kelly:  Thank you very much to Claudia and all of our panelists.  The goal of Global Governance Watch is to take a look at all these issues and to not only provide foundational content, but also to look at the current developments in these areas.  What I’d like to do at this time, someone has a microphone, and, if you would please direct your questions to any of our panelists on any of the things that they talked about, or any other questions that you have regarding Global Governance Watch, or the global governance issue, we welcome them. 

 Frank Fletcher:  Yes, Frank Fletcher, STS Group.  Will Global Governance Watch look at the issue of the law of the sea and its implications for national sovereignty? 

 David Peyton:  I can field that answer.  Yes, it will, in fact, there’s a section on the law of the sea under the national security pillar.  If you head to the website, www.globalgovernancewatch.org, click on the national security portion of it, and you’ll see a section on the law of the sea. 

 John Fonte [ph.]:  John Fonte of the Hudson Institute.  This is for Mr. Cass.  Jeremy Rapkin [ph.], you probably know, a constitutional law professor at George Mason University, is worried about the AB, the appellate body of the WTO as potentially developing independent case law that could override the decision-making process of elected parliaments, U.S. Congress, or European parliaments, or a democratic parliamentary state.  I was wondering if you agreed with Professor Rapkin or you had a different take on this, and if you could explain it, please?  Thank you. 

 Ronald A. Cass:  Well, any time you set up a body that is reviewing decisions of others and explicating the rules, you have an opportunity for the rules to depart from the underlying text.  The rule, as, not only a professor of international law, but of constitutional law, the rule here, for years, was, if you couldn’t get something in the text, get it in the history, and if you can’t get it in the history, get it in the courts.  You have the same sort of risk with the decision-making at the WTO.  So far, however, I don’t think we have seen that. 

 The bigger risk, I think, at the WTO, isn’t that the decisions are going to go off, because, by and large, you have a series of decisions, you have arbitral decisions, you have review of panel decisions, so far those decisions have seemed to track pretty closely the text of the WTO.  The bigger risk is that you have declarations, you have ministerial declarations, you have other groups that are not formally empowered to alter text that are making declarations at odds with the underlying text.  And you see this, let me go back to the patent issue, there are some declarations that have been adopted during the Doha round negotiations that don’t have binding effect, but you have groups that are NGOs that are trying to promote these outcomes, that are trying to persuade people that these do have binding effect, and, if they persuade enough people, at some point you run that risk.  I don’t, at this point, have Jeremy’s level of concern, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye on. 

 Male Audience Member:  [Indiscernible], Department of Interior.  Since the organization doesn’t seem to be very accountable to anybody, perhaps the next best thing is to have a lot of sunshine.  I was wondering if the Global Governance Watch might not set up a corruption corner which it can populate with whatever knowledge you have privy to regarding corruption in the United Nations, and, essentially, just keep beating them on that?  It might be useful to have something like that, perhaps that might shame some governments into saying, that, hey, we are going to make use of the funding for this piece of the pie, or what have you, which is essentially what will eventually be useful. 

 But, I do agree with you, I think a lot of these schemes that I see out there for the United Nations, essentially, things like clean development mechanism, and so on and so forth, I see these as actually backdoor approaches to get a regular source of funding without having to get them from anybody in particular.  I think that is something that really ought to be highlighted.  I have to believe that with the amount of money that could come sloshing in, with the clean development mechanism there are plenty of opportunities for corruption, and I suspect, given the opportunity, they will indeed, somebody will indeed want to make the most of that. 

 Claudia Rosett:  A quick word here.  It’s a very good idea, I’m not working in Global Governance Watch, but that would be a wonderful place to put some things like this.  On corruption, and you’re quite right, these great flows of money are just, it’s already happened, one of the big scandals we just saw over the past year and one-half was with the U.N. Development Program, which is their biggest, their flagship agency.  The guy who runs that is the number three man at the U.N.  They were involved in, a senate investigation has just disclosed to us in January, following many reports in the press, they were involved in the movement of money, both illicit money to the government of North Korea, and effectively laundering money out to front companies for North Korean weapons programs in Maukau [ph.], as well as the still unexplained use of a UNDP related account to launder money of North Korea to their embassies in places like London and New York.  If anybody can explain what happened, please. 

 But, the difficulty with all this is that people just start to lose track.  You can endlessly enumerate UN scandals, and it becomes, at this point it’s sort of, what was the massive Oil-for-Food scandal, we now have sort of a thousand little, not little, scandals, and people simply start to go numb.  It’s why I think somewhere in this debate it’s just crucial to keep coming back to first principles.  Why is it that this is not some unfortunate accident that these things happen at the U.N., it is built into the design.  It’s the same way when Gorbachev was trying to clean up the Soviet Union.  It was impossible.  He was working with a system that generates dirt.  You actually need to ask what structures that are completely different, designed for this millennium, might promote some better cooperation internationally.  Thank you. 

 James P. Kelly:  The Global Governance Watch website will be monitoring corruption in the U.N. and other international institutions to the extent that we will be reporting on all reports of the finding of corruption that come from various sources, whether it be Claudia’s fine work, or internal reports, and that will be most likely in the development pillar as they occur.  That’s where our foundational topic of anticorruption and corruption matters is addressed, we link to Paul Volcker’s report, we link to Wall Street Journal editorials on the subject, anything that comes along, shining the spotlight on corruption within any international institution we will have on our website.  We won’t be out in the field looking for it, but when someone finds it, you’ll see it on the website.  Joseph has a comment about that question, though. 

 Ambassador Grover Joseph Rees:  I wanted to use Claudia’s answer and the question as a springboard for something I should have said earlier.  I’m the only government representative, I’m the only person here who is currently working for the government, I think, on the panel, and I should have observed that my presence here doesn’t imply that the State Department endorses or opposes any particular project or website.  I do, however, have a recommendation, also borrowing from Claudia’s remarks earlier, that if this is the future of global governance, and she stated some conditions under which it might make sense, I think possibly as the website and the project expands you could have, as one of your pillars, Plan Neptune, so that there would be competition, there would be alternatives to global governance.  Of course, we would have to work on climate change before that could be achieved. 

 Male Voice:  Just as a point of reference, within the development pillar of Global Governance Watch, there is already foundational content linking to some of the reports on the World Bank corruption scandals, and we will continually update that.  It’s in what we call our good governance section. 

 John Wohlstetter:  John Wohlstetter, Senior Fellow Discovery Institute.  A couple of suggestions you might consider for the panels comment.  One is that the G7 nations fund somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the United Nations operations.  I’m excluding Russia from that for obvious reasons in G8.  It would seem there’d be some opportunities for leverage there.  The other is a suggestion that John Bolton had in his book, which is that the organizations that work best in the United Nations, like the World Health Organization and stuff, are voluntarily funded, and if the entire United Nations were funded that way, the same opportunities for leverage might curb a great deal of mischief. 

 Claudia Rosett:  John, thank you.  I have huge respect for Ambassador Bolton, and I, to disagree with him on anything is a terrifying thought from this platform, especially, but, with respect to Ambassador Bolton, I would suggest considering that most of what the U.N. does now is voluntarily funded.  Most of the UNDP, in fact, the UNDP is voluntary funding.  Most of what everyone contributes to it is voluntary.  The core budget, the assessed dues that go to the U.N. are roughly $2 billion per year.  That’s one-tenth of the estimated system-wide budget.  The problem is that the U.N., it’s not just a matter of tax money is before it’s turned over, it’s that the U.N. is a machine, it’s sort of like you can go to the mafia and they’ll do things for you, and if you want to, if you’re an official in a corrupt country who wants to launder money back to your own family through a U.N. program, the U.N. has many ways that it will help you do that.  That’s exactly the kind of thing I just described with North Korea.

 So, it’s not just a matter of, if we give dues or don’t, it’s a matter of, some of these voluntary contributions come from places which are very happy to use the U.N. as a Laundromat for their money.  It has diplomatic immunity across borders, it answers effectively to almost no jurisdictions, just keep it out of the southern district, and that’s the much bigger problem.  This machine has been created that can be used by the least scrupulous, this Durban 2 conference that we’re seeing right now, where, right now there’s a fight over, should this be funded out of the core budget.  This is this anti-Israel, anti-U.S., anti-Western values conference with Libya chairing the preparatory committee in Iran and Pakistan and Cuba, we’re working on it, meeting next week in Geneva, but, the problem there is, even if you got voluntary funding for this thing it still precedes under the U.N. logo with U.N. immunity and gets this whole giant platform it wouldn’t otherwise have.  So, I would suggest, I think it’s possibly the only thing in creation in which I disagree with John Bolton, but, please, consider it seriously.  Thank you. 

 Carl Close:  Carl Close, the Independent Institute.  Will Global Governance Watch be monitoring the impact of Western environmental groups on the sovereignty of developing nations? 

 James P. Kelly:  Yes, that will be in our global regulation, right now, do you want to come up and show them how that would be done?  This is the climate change regulation which talks not only about whatever treaties might apply, or declarations, or whatever outcomes there are from U.N. conferences on climate change, it also takes a look at contrary studies that are being done.  Was it George Mason University, there was a recent report done disputing some of the evidence contained in the reports that were used to consider it at the Bali meeting.  So, absolutely, we will be looking at those issues. 

 We have time for one more question in the back, please. 

 Chuck Willory [ph.]:  Yes, Chuck Willory, former Chair of the United Nations Association Council of Organizations.  I agree with much of what you said about the U.N. being designed not to work.  In fact, in its original creation, there was supposed to have been a people’s assembly, which would have given the people a voice within the U.N.  A lot of complaints I hear about the U.N. is that it’s not democratic, and I agree completely.  But what I’m frustrated by is any attempt to democratize the U.N. is frustrated or halted.  For example, the Security Council has no accountability, and with the United States being on that Security Council with no electable, there’s no accountability there.  So how do you address that problem where you claim there’s no democratization, but when you want to democratize it, there is no willingness to do that? 

 James P. Kelly:  Joseph, do you want to take that question? 

 Ambassador Grover Joseph Rees:  Well, you’re talking about the only part of the United Nations that sort of does work.  There are generally two problems with governance in the United Nations, first the substance, and second the process.  Well, you can certainly abstractly criticize the Security Council, and the United States is open to reform of the Security Council as part of a broader reform of the United Nations.  We have indeed endorsed the expansion of the permanent five by one member, at least one member, Japan, because we think Japan is the second largest contributor to the United Nations system.

 If there’s going to be a Security Council with five members, or some number of members who have a veto, we believe Japan ought to be one of those.  But, when you look empirically, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said about the common law, the life of the law has not been logic, it’s been history, and, when you look empirically at what works in the United Nations, the Security Council works a lot better than anything else, and it works because of the veto.  It’s frustrating to us sometimes.  We proposed a resolution on Burma, which we thought was very important, which had a lot of support, but, there were two vetoes.  We had nine votes.  We had the majority, the solid majority of the Security Council, but, China vetoed and Russia vetoed. 

 So, the veto doesn’t always work in our favor for the outcomes that we want, but, in general, you can’t get anything through the Security Council that doesn’t really have a consensus.  The five permanent members are different enough that I think that’s a true statement.  The Security Council, therefore, limits itself to those situations that are much more than any other U.N. entity that are really within its charter.  So while we’re open to United Nations reform, and we should be, it would be tragic to reform first, and maybe only, the part that works best. 

 James P. Kelly:  That’s all the time that we have today for questions.  Sorry for the short time that we have.  I do want to, in conclusion, unless you have some remarks, David, that you’d like to make.  In conclusion I would like to thank our panelists, all three of whom I think did a magnificent job.  [Applause].  I would also like to thank, not by name, because there’d be too many of you in the audience, but I do see some of our dear friends who have been working on these issues of international law and global governance for many, many years, and we thank you for that work and we also look forward to your appreciation and consideration and revision and comment on our website, globalgovernancewatch.org, along the way.  We look at you as our partners as much as our two formal partners in this project and hope to hear from you very soon, both David Peyton and Alyssa Luttjohann.  Thank you very much. 

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