UNITED STATES
National Catholic Register
by BRIAN FRAGA 02/08/2014
UNITED NATIONS — A U.N. committee’s report that said the Holy See should change its moral teachings in order to comply with an international treaty on children’s rights is the latest example in a 20-year history of U.N. bureaucrats trying to coerce member states into accepting secularist values, according to several Catholic observers of the international body.
“This was a ‘gift from God,’ and the reason is because it points out to a huge audience the radicalism of the United Nations’ treaty monitoring bodies, who have been doing things like this for years,” said Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), a non-governmental organization that monitors the United Nations.
Since 1994, when the Holy See successfully fought back efforts to declare abortion an international human right during a U.N. conference in Cairo, abortion advocates and their allies, according to a C-FAM white paper, have looked to further their agenda by relying upon U.N. committees, known as treaty bodies, to interpret international human-rights treaties to cover topics not mentioned in the actual treaties, such as wider access to birth control, permissive abortion laws and the legalization of same-sex “marriages.”
“These treaty bodies have been sort of inclined to aggrandize for their own power, and they’ve done it by controlling the process by which countries report on their implementation of these treaties,” said Stefano Gennarini, the director of C-FAM’s Center for Legal Studies.
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