I’m not sure that people of good sense need any additional reasons to be skeptical of becoming overly entangled with the United Nations, but anyone who does need look no further than the National Review Online article today by Lance Izumi and Sharon Browne of the Pacific Research Institute.
Remember Berkeley? No, not the university, the school district that has, so far, been allowed to continue assigning students by race despite the prohibitions of Proposition 209 (discussed, with links, here). In today’s article Izumi and Browne point out that Judge Richman, the Alameda County judge who saw no conflict between racial assignment and Prop. 209, also relied in part on the 1965 United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which has been incorporated into California law.
The U.N. treaty, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1994, says that “special measures taken for the sole purpose of adequate advancement of certain racial or ethnic groups or individuals requiring such protection as may be necessary in order to ensure such groups or individuals equal enjoyment or exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms shall not be deemed racial discrimination….” In other words, race-preference programs are okay as long as they advance some nebulous U.N. notion of human rights.
Then-Governor Gray Davis and the liberal state lawmakers who enacted section 8315, which gave force of law to the U.N. treaty, tried to undercut Prop. 209 through the section’s wording that treaty-sanctioned “Special measures shall not be interpreted as preferential treatment.” Judge Richman described the Berkeley program as a race-conscious school assignment plan that provided all students with the “same benefit of desegregated schools.” He therefore ruled that applying Prop. 209 to the Berkeley case would be “inconsistent” with the language of the U.N. treaty.
This sort of thing makes it harder to argue that the black helicopter-fearing right wing militias are totally nuts.
Ward Connerly and the Pacific Legal Foundation are challenging this ruling, as well as Section 8315 of the California governing code. (See the complaint here.)
