The British Empire Pushes Treaty After Treaty

The treaties also explicitly are aimed at replacing national sovereignty with rule by the United Nations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

While most people assume that these treaties have been drafted by the representatives of sovereign governments, in fact, most were drafted by a gaggle of NGOs. The most influential of these are the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), also known as the World Conservation Union, and the World Wildlife Fund, also known as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). More recently, the World Resources Institute, an offshoot of the WWF, has been playing a major role in drafting such treaties.

The Command Structure

These UN treaties, however, could not be ratified unless some governments provided the crucial early backing. How this works is outlined in the Green Globe Yearbook, published by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway. The Yearbook provides an overview of the status of all UN environmental treaties and conventions, including maps and charts of which countries have signed and ratified which treaties (the yearbook tracks 49 treaties). What is immediately apparent from the charts--and apparent to anyone who has attended any of the meetings where the treaties are drafted and ratified--is that, almost invariably, the British Commonwealth nations are the first ones to sign and ratify these treaties.

The significance of this is that, according to the individual rules of each treaty, and the rules of the UN, it takes anywhere from 20 to 50 nations to ratify a treaty so that the treaty becomes international law. Thus, all it takes for a treaty to become international law, is the ratification of the British Commonwealth nations, of which there are 56!

Major Treaties On The Environment

• Framework Convention on Climate Change

  The objective of this treaty is to ``stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.'' To accomplish this, nations will gather in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997 to set industrial emissions limits. The effect will be to shut down industries around the world and prevent the industrialization of the Third World.

• Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer (better known as the Montreal Protocol)

  This treaty bans the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other halogenated chemicals. Millions of people will die around the world as a result of this treaty, from the collapse of the world's refrigerated cold-chain, which depends on CFCs (refrigerants).

• Antarctic Treaty

  This treaty seals off an enormous area of the world, the Antarctic Continent and surrounding oceans, from development and commercial use.

• World Heritage Convention

  This treaty sets aside huge areas of the world in which economic development, and even the presence of man, are prohibited.

• Convention on Biological Diversity

  This treaty sets nature and animals on an equal, if not a higher footing than man, and prohibits any kind of economic activity anywhere in the world that would harm an endangered ecosystem, whatever that may be.

• Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)

  This prohibits international trade in so-called endangered species.

• International Convention to Combat Desertification

  Now in negotiation, this treaty would restrict any kind of human activities in areas that are deemed to be in danger of desertification. It is perhaps one of the most dangerous conventions, because its definition of ``desertification'' is so broad, for example, that more than half the United States would qualify as ``desertified.''