David Kopel at Volokh [1]
Earlier this week, Sen. Fred Thompson wrote to Field & Stream magazine, criticizing [2] the UN’s campaign against the human right of self-defense. The Thompson campaign touted [3] the letter on its website, and the letter got a favorable reception [4]among many pro-Second Amendment bloggers.
The Thompson letter, including its quotation of the great Dutch philosopher of international law, Hugo Grotius, appears to have used as a source the Kopel/Gallant/Eisen article “The Human Right of Self-Defense [5],” which is forthcoming in volume 22 of the BYU Journal of Public Law. (We’re in the middle of the cite-check right now, so the draft on my website is not the final version. And kudos to the BYU staff for its hard work on a monstrous cite-check with hundreds of sources, many of them not in the collection of an ordinary law library.)
Sen. Thompson’s letter prompted criticism from Kevin Drum [6] of the Washington Monthly and Stephen Benen [7], both of whom relied on a refutation written by UN Dispatch [8], a weblog funded by the UN Foundation.
Today, the Knoxville News reports [9] that it was UN Dispatch that got the facts wrong. The Special Rapporteur’s Report which Thompson criticized (and which was adopted and endorsed by a submcommission of the UN Human Rights Council) quite explicitly says that personal self-defense is not a human right.
Yeah, well, that Benen and Drum would come out against the right of a human being to defend himself from attack shouldn’t be much of a shock to anyone who has read them for any period of time. Indeed the position they take seems to me to explain much in the remaining articles of theirs I’ve read. There’s a theme that runs through them; The sacrafice of the rights of the few, or the one, for what the leftists in government maintain is the good of the majority. … in this case, the ability to defend one’s self.
The report in question clearly states:
“The principle of self-defence has an important place in international human rights law, but does not provide an independent, supervening right to small arms possession . . . .”
So, we have a right to defend ourselves but we do not have the right to have the tools to do so. Brilliant! What wisdom! What foresight! What horsedoodle!
But it gets worse… in digging around a little, one enterprising commenter at Volokh suggested we look on page 9 of this report [10] Barbara Frey, Special Rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Councils’s Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (How big are their business cards?) on page nine, where she says:
Self-defence is sometimes designated as a “right”. There is inadequate legal support for such an interpretation.
Can someone please tell me again why we are subjecting ourselves to this monster on Turtle bay?