. . .people (rightly) call you on it.

When I posted Friday on the Convention on Conventional Weapons, I mistook the Obama Administration’s action — depositing the instruments of ratification for Protocols III, IV, and V of the Convention — for its signing them.  As commenter D.Poteet noted,

The Senate actually took action approving ratification of these Protocols in September 2008, as noted at Opino Juris.  I do not believe the Senate’s action was opposed by the administration at that time, including by DoD.

You are right that there are multiple steps to approving a treaty. The actual ratification of the treaty does not occur until the President signs and deposits the instrument of ratification with the appropriate country or international organization, subsequent to the approval by the U.S. Senate. The Senate’s action is required by the U.S. Constitution as a condition precedent to ratification, but it is not ratification itself.

What can I say?  I knew that.  But in my rush to post, I got mixed up.  Just goes to show what happens when a non-lawyer tries to comment on treaty law.

But my mistakes did not end with my mistake on the relevant steps.  Oh nooooo.  I even got the politics wrong, as noted by commenter J:

The Bush Administration supported the Senate ratification of these protocols last year, and John Bellinger, then the State Department’s top lawyer and someone close to Secretary of State Rice, testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support. The Obama Administration is only carrying out what was put in process by its predecessors, as the Senate did move to ratify these protocols last fall. Partisan swipes here are not correct.

So I went back and looked — and yep, it’s true.  Bellinger testified before the SFRC in June, as did Charles Allen, the then-Deputy Counsel for International Affairs at DOD and Brig. Gen. Michelle Johnson, on behalf of the Joint Staff.  And all of them supported ratification.

So apologies to my readers for the mistakes.  Apologies to the Bush Administration, particularly John Bellinger, whose service as Legal Advisor to the Secretary of State was one of the few bright spots in that Administration.  And thanks to both J and D. Poteet for the astute corrections.

I stick by two things in the original story, however.  The first is that this should have been more widely reported, particularly given the fact that ratification of Protocol V could be used as justification for ratification of the Ottawa Treaty.

And second, I still beleive that John Bolton and David Addington are somewhere (unfortunately, in the case of Addington, not a prison) turining a lovely shade of purple over this.

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