Frank Gaffney posted an article at Townhall.com about the Law Of The Sea Treaty (LOST) which may come up in the lame-duck session of the Senate at the end of the year. The treaty essentially will give the United Nations control over all waterways and set up a justice system at the United Nations that all nations would be under. In a few words, it is a direct threat to American sovereignty.
The article reports:
First, as Senator Lott once warned, ratification of LOST would commit the United States to submit to mandatory dispute resolution with respect to U.S. military and industrial operations. While LOST proponents argue that the United States will choose available arbitration mechanisms to avoid legal decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), such arbitration panels are no-less perilous for U.S. interests as the decisive, “swing” arbiters would be appointed by generally unfriendly UN-affiliated bureaucrats. The arbitration panels can also be relied upon to look to rulings by the ICJ or ITLOS to inform their own decisions.
Furthermore, while there is a LOST provision exempting “military activity” from such dispute resolution mechanisms, the Treaty makes no attempt to define “military activity,” virtually guaranteeing that such matters will be litigated – in all likelihood to our detriment – before one or another of LOST’s arbitration mechanisms. And the rulings of such arbitrators cannot be appealed.
I don’t think this is what our founding fathers had in mind.
The article concludes:
Of particular concern is the fact that LOST creates an international taxation regime. It does so by empowering the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to tax Americans for the purposes of meeting its ownadministrative costs and of globally redistributing revenue derived from the exploitation of seabed resources.
It is a travesty to portray atreaty with such clearly sovereignty-sapping provisions as an enhancement to our national sovereignty. LOST should be rejected this time – as President Ronald Reagan did thirty years ago and as Senator Lott urged twenty-five years later.
The UN has shown a definite lack of wisdom in selecting members of its Human Rights Commission, do we really want them to exercise any control over America?
