But countries can ratify with legal reservations, and the treaty language has many loopholes.
Ninety years ago this month, all eyes turned to Tennessee, the only state yet to ratify with its Legislature still in session.
The earlier 1980 convention had ruled that countries had to individually ratify with each other for a child to be returned to the country from which they were taken, but the 1996 model states that countries need only to have signed up for it to be applied.
The treaty was ratified with strong bipartisan support and Mr. Perot was essentially finished as a national political figure.
The vote was bipartisan, and the treaty was ratified with no restrictive covenants, in accordance with the agreement reached in Moscow on Jul.
Three previous arms control treaties — Start I (1992), Start II (1996) and the Moscow Treaty (2003) — were ratified with substantial bipartisan support.
Mr. Ferry's work was ratified with the Bobbitt Prize of $10,000 for his book "Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations" (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
In 2000 the commercial possibilities of this trend were ratified with Time Inc.'s introduction of the magazine "Real Simple," and in 2005 Staples started promoting itself with an "Easy Button".
In 1805 Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike, leader of an American expedition to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi River, made a treaty there (never officially ratified) with the Sioux for possession of the region, including the site on which the military outpost Fort Snelling (now a state park) was later built.
Mr. Balaran's report also found that a federal employee, Anson Baker, the Bureau of Indian Affairs' chief appraiser for the Navajo region, had destroyed documents related to these agreements, which Navajo landowners often ratified with a thumb print because they could not speak, read or write English.
Vismarkt's transformation from eyesore to cafe quarter has been ratified with the opening of two hotels: a discreet Novotel (+15 404 950, accorhotels.com, doubles from €59) on one side of the Dijle, and the Hotel Vé (+15 200 755, hotelve.com, doubles from €98), a plush designer billet in an old herring smokery, on the other.
