By ratifying the Convention, governments become legally bound to implement the rights therein.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property.
But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes.
Government itself is founded upon the great doctrine of the consent of the governed, and has its cornerstone in the memorable principle that men are endowed with inalienable rights.
Outside of the Constitution we have no legal authority more than private citizens, and within it we have only so much as that instrument gives us. This broad principle limits all our functions and applies to all subjects.
The core of human rights work is naming and shaming those who commit abuses, and pressuring governments to put the screws to abusing states. As a result, human rights conventions are unique among international law instruments in depending for their enforcement mostly on the activism of a global civil society movement.
The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.
Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.
All, or nearly all, the advantage there is in fixing any constitutional limits to the power of a government, is simply to give notice to the government of the point at which it will meet with resistance.
The right of revolution, which tyrants, in mockery, accord to mankind, is no legal right under a government; it is only a natural right to overturn a government.
The government has the right to change laws and rules and regulations.