Member States traded away existing human rights safeguards to reach a contrived consensus for a treaty that will endanger journalists, dissenters, human rights activists, and every day people around the world.
Fortunately, those same legal principles in the US cannot be overridden by a treaty.
Unfortunately, the UN mostly works as a venue for governments negotiating with governments, with accredited NGOs having a position of being tolerated in those discussions, but with no real power. Outside of those tolerated NGOs, influence drops even further.
(When I was at EFF, we did try to get UN official accreditation, but China would consistently veto it. There are other digital rights groups that have been accepted though, and we worked very closely with those. The full list of NGOs are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_con... )
I think it almost doesn't make sense, in that I perceive EFF to be, whether overtly or not, a very American organization with very American public policy views.
The EFF isn't like that - for example, the idea of outlawing DRM, while popular among hackers and people here, is a total nonstarter internationally. It's about as effective as hiring the FSF to lecture Microsoft; or hiring PETA to lecture Tyson; or hiring the Amish to lecture you on electrical design. The opinions are so diametrically opposed that it's not even worth considering.
> This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
And there is no explicit ordering of priority between them and the Constitution.
You don't have to get there axiomatically though; you can just look this up. Treaties are coequal with federal statutes, and are overridden by any conflicting statute passed after the treaty is ratified.
In particular, a lot of global proposals come out of the US, especially around IP, so having a US organization say "this is what the US political situation is, this is how this has worked out in the US, and these are the lobbying groups pressuring the US to support this internationally", can be very useful.
I was EFF's international activist and later international director for a number of years. A lot of EFF's rhetoric is aimed at US lawmakers, and its primary USP for change, public impact litigation in the US courts, means that a lot of what you see is oriented toward American audiences and actions.
But behind the scenes, much more of the work than you'd imagine has a global side to it. This has been true since the days of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, elements of which were rejected by the US Congress in the mid-Nineties, then policy-laundered through WIPO into the 1996 Copyright Treaty, which meant that it had to become law after the US Senate consented to it in 1999. (Treaties don't need the support of both houses in the US). EFF and other orgs at the time learned the lesson that regional and international agreements can often be an end-run around local democracy or norms -- and that local laws (from the DMCA to the GDPR) can have wider ramifications on a global network.
EFF and partner groups often contribute to government and international proposals (a hundred-or-so of them have been involved in the cybercrime treaty process for many years https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/joint-statement-propos... and I believe got it to a fairly good place before a last-minute push by some states to introduce more surveillance into it.)
You don't really get to hear about the compromises, because you don't really need to kick up a fuss about something that has worked out okay -- and even if you do post about the positive fine print, nobody sends such exciting documents to the front page of Hacker News.
> even if you do post about the positive fine print, nobody sends such exciting documents to the front page of Hacker News.
This actually isn't a great example: the Amish do use electricity on their farms. They just don't like to be connected to the grid, so they're big supporters of solar power. They probably know a lot more about electrical design than you think (depending on your definition of "electrical design"). They even have internet-connected computers so they can get orders from customers.
A better example might be hiring the Amish to lecture you on public transit design in dense cities. Not that they're opposed to it, but it's just something far outside their experience (they don't live in dense cities). Or back to electricity, having them lecture you about grid-scale electrical transmission, or nuclear power generation.
Isn't that exactly what the linked page suggests in this case? Most of the recommendations are things like "Limit Articles 23(2)(c) and 35(1)(c) to Articles 7 to 11 and delete Article 23(2)(b)", not "burn the thing down and start over".
As it pertains to your question, the Constitution (and its amendments) are the supreme law of the land, and a treaty stipulation that requires the government to do something unconstitutional would have no legal effect.
> The enforceability of treaties was further limited in the 2008 Supreme Court decision in Medellín v. Texas, which held that even if a treaty may constitute an international commitment, it is not binding domestic law unless it has been implemented by an act of Congress or is itself explicitly "self-executing".[26] Law scholars called the ruling "an invisible constitutional change" that departed from both longtime historical practice and the plain language of the Supremacy Clause.[27]