[pythonistic]

The US and it's relations with the UN were a focus of one of my senior seminars in History (1995). I'm a programmer, not a political scientist or attorney, so read this critically. In short:

* The UN Human Rights Council declares specific Human Rights. Countries choose to accept them or not.

* The US has a Constitution which defines specific limitations on the power of government. Rather than granting rights, there are limitations placed on what government can do. The Bill of Rights amends the Constitution to describe specific rights in some cases granted to citizens and specific limitations that the federal government has when dealing with citizens.

There's a fundamental disconnect in "governments grant these rights to people" versus "people inherently have rights and these are the curbs we put around them." An even bigger impediment is that the UN HRC would supersede the US Congress: these changes to the US Constitution and laws would be imposed without a treaty or legislative input. A committee in an extra-national organization (which has a history of, at times, not working well with the United States) would be imposing regulations on the US. Imagine one of our hard-working Congressmen abrogating power in favor of declarations from a UN committee.

For the UN HRC to have any impact on the United States, we'd need to amend our Constitution to grant power to an international organization, or establish a treaty to implement its recommendations. Importantly, we'd need to change the fundamental concept by which citizens have power and rights and government is restricted. (And I'm ignoring _Gibbons v. Ogden_ (1824) and the expansion of the Interstate Commerce Clause and Federal regulation throughout the 20th century.)