We don't need no steenkeen international law

The Mexican government’s human rights arm, along with its counterparts from Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras, launched a formal complaint against the Trump administration at the Organization of American States.

[...]

In appealing to the OAS, the five agencies are invoking a little-known tool in international law. Since the 1948 launch of the OAS, the United States has been bound by the terms of the Inter-American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, known as the Bogotá Declaration. The most significant human rights document up to that time (the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights came shortly thereafter), it obliged the states of the Americas to protect “the right to life, liberty and the security” of every human being, to give protection to families and to grant “all children … the right to special protection, care and aid.

[...]

After Wednesday’s executive order, the Mexican human rights agency reiterated its complaint, sent monitors to the northern border and called on governments around the world to “form a united front” against Trump’s migration policies and the ongoing detentions and separations.

  Politico

Good luck with that. No other country has yet managed to put the brakes on any US policy. Maybe the tariff situation will be different, but human rights? That's ours to abuse and has been ever since the first Brits set foot on the continent.  Hey, we even usurped the very name America from all other countries on both North and South American continents.

Mexico’s complaint now goes to the OAS’ Inter-American Commission of Human Rights. This is a panel of seven human rights experts (currently all non-U.S. nationals) empowered to ask member states to change their policies or make other types of reparations for human rights abuses.

Anybody can ask. The answer is always going to be: butt out. (See, eg, Nikki Haley's response to the UN report on poverty in America.)

In urgent situations in which there is a risk of irreversible damage, the commission can also order what are called “precautionary measures” to safeguard rights—something Mexico specifically asked for on the separation policy, which represented in its view a “total contempt for the rights of children” that posed “irreparable harm” to them.

If the commission orders precautionary measures or ultimately finds the U.S. in violation of the Bogotá Declaration, there’s an open question about what happens next.

Wait. I think I know. We tell them to butt out.

There’s no enforcement mechanism that applies to the United States; most Latin American countries signed up for the more enforceable obligations of a 1978 convention, which includes the ability to order monetary penalties against states that violate human rights, but the Carter administration was unable to persuade Congress to ratify it.

Oooh, color me surprised.

The most the other signatories to the Bogatá conventions can do is kick us out. Pretty sure we don't care.

In a landmark 2011 decision, the first of its kind, the commission ruled that the United States had failed to protect the human rights of Jessica Gonzales. In that case, Castle Rock, Colorado, police had failed to enforce a restraining order against her estranged husband, who then abducted and killed her three kids. The U.S. Supreme Court heard her case, and found her constitutional rights had not been violated as a matter of U.S. law. Undeterred, Gonzales then took her case to the commission, which sided with her and confirmed U.S. obligations to fight gender bias in law enforcement. Far from objecting to these proceedings, the George W. Bush administration, and then the Obama administration acknowledged the gravity of the situation, showed up and argued their case—moves that gave the process the implicit if not explicit U.S. seal of approval. The commission’s decision gave Gonzales a tool to push for domestic policy change, which ultimately culminated in a new Justice Department policy on gender bias in 2015.

And how's that going?

This legally binding quality sets the OAS’ decisions apart from interventions in other multinational venues. The various trade and investment tribunals around the world lack subject matter jurisdiction over migrants. The U.S. has opted out of compulsory jurisdiction of the global International Court of Justice, and the Trump administration withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday—echoing an earlier decision by George W. Bush not to join during his term. The U.S. can leave the council without leaving the U.N., whereas the U.S. would have to leave the OAS entirely to avoid being bound by commission decisions.

In the words of Dick Cheney, "So what?"

Trump actually does need the OAS. The OAS is the main organ through which the United States puts pressure on Venezuela and Cuba—a major priority among Florida voters Trump needs to keep in his column heading into the next election. The OAS has regional legitimacy that the administration lacks, and to give this up would be geopolitically and electorally risky.

Has there been any indication at all in Trump's presidency that he cares about geopolitical risk? Electoral risk, perhaps, but the people he's counting on voting for him don't give any more fucks than he does about human rights.

While most of the isolationists and hawks at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. may not care about such signals, members of Congress may care more if a body with legitimacy throughout the Americas weighs in—not just on an individual rights violation like Gonzales’, but against an overall policy stance of the U.S. government.

Not the Republicans. Time to join the reality based world and recognize that none of the past moral - or, indeed, legal - restraints on this country are functional.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.