Getting Human Rights Right

[Valin]

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Mike Pompeo is trying – to the chagrin of the human rights establishment.

Clifford D. May

July 17 2019

At the State Department, human rights have generally been a not-so-high priority.  The big kahunas tend to focus on war and peace, allies and adversaries, national security and global economics.

So it came as something of a surprise when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week launched a bipartisan Commission on Unalienable Rights. Its task, Mr. Pompeo wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “isn’t to discover new principles but to ground our discussion of human rights in America’s founding principles.”

Commission members “will address basic questions: What are our fundamental freedoms? Why do we have them? Who or what grants these rights? How do we know if a claim of human rights is true? What happens when rights conflict? Should certain categories of rights be inextricably ‘linked’ to other rights?”

Good questions and a praise-worthy initiative, yes? Not to members of the human rights establishment and their tribunes.

(Snip)

To head the commission, Mr. Pompeo named Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard professor, former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, and author of a book on Eleanor Roosevelt’s impact on human rights. She said the panel would attempt to provide clarity at a time when “basic human rights are being misunderstood by many, manipulated by many and ignored by the world’s worst human rights violators.”

A worthy mission, no? Not to the members of the human rights establishment and their tribunes.