A New State Department Report Cements Mike Pompeo’s Twisted View of Human Rights

Not all rights are apparently created equal.

Jim Loscalzo/CNP/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Last July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched an advisory panel to help the US practice “a moral foreign policy … grounded in [a] conception of human rights.” Crucially, its mission, Pompeo explained, would include reining in a dangerous proliferation of “new” human rights. “Unalienable rights are by nature universal. Not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed explaining the formation of this Commission on Unalienable Rights. “Loose talk of ‘rights’ unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy.” 

It didn’t take long for human rights experts to read between the lines. Pompeo, whose leadership of the State Department has become in many ways an experiment in how quickly he can orient American foreign policy toward his evangelical Christian faith, stocked the commission with academics and diplomats best known for defending religious freedom while opposing reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality. 

On Thursday, the commission finally unveiled a draft of its long-anticipated report, finding—surprise, surprise—just what Pompeo suggested in his initial op-ed: not all rights are created equal. Describing a human rights landscape “in crisis,” the report focuses mainly on the Declaration of Independence and Universal Declaration of Human Rights and mostly ignores the binding treaties establishing a framework for international human rights law. The problem, as the commissioners see it, is that a proliferation of new rights include many in competition with one another, which has eroded the international consensus around human rights. The solution, then, is to boost protections of certain rights, particularly religious freedom, while diminishing others. 

“As anticipated, the report elevates religious freedom as an unalienable right, while dismissing abortion and same-sex marriages as not rights but instead ‘divisive social and political controversies,'” Jayne Huckerby, director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Duke Law School, tells me. She notes that the report “recognizes that legally there should be no hierarchy between different types of rights,” but “still calls for US foreign policy to de-emphasize economic and social rights compared with civil and political ones.”

In practice, that has already started to happen. With Pompeo leading from Foggy Bottom, the United States has renounced its role as a leader in promoting LGBTQ equality and reproductive rights abroad, most prominently in Trump’s expansion of the so-called global gag rule, which restricts which nongovernmental organizations can receive US aid based on whether they perform any abortion-related activities. US diplomats have teamed up with countries with abominable records on these issues—Saudi Arabia and Brazil among them—to oppose international agreements aimed at preserving those rights. When Trump appeared at the United Nations General Assembly last year, he chose to host an event focused on religious freedom. And, while his administration regularly attempts to cut back on international aid, the president still recently signed an executive order giving $50 million to support international religious freedom. 

“This administration practices consistent and continued erasure of LGBTQ people and refuses to acknowledge that access to reproductive health care is essential for survival,” says Molly Bangs, director of reproductive rights advocacy group Equity Forward. “LGBTQ people face threats to their health, safety, and civil rights here at home and around the globe and this report makes zero mention of protecting their rights.”

Since the commission’s formation, Pompeo has been a public cheerleader of its work, taking care to note that the group is not crafting policy, but simply elaborating “the principles through which we can ground America’s commitment to championing human rights in our enduring dedication to unalienable rights and our tradition of constitutional self-government,” as he wrote in the Washington Post this week. For the past several days, he’s been tweeting in anticipation of the release of its draft report, pairing quotes from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. with the hashtag “UnalienableRights.” Still, his support for the panel has often been nakedly political and, of course, does not exactly honor the legacy of the very individuals he’s held up as symbols of these unalienable rights. Pompeo traveled to Philadelphia on Thursday, ignoring concerns about the safety of himself, his team, and others during the coronavirus pandemic, to give a speech at the National Constitutional Center. In his remarks, he took time to criticize “rioters” for “desecrating monuments to those who fought for unalienable rights” and suggested that the New York Times‘ 1619 Project, which examines the legacy of slavery in the United States, was “a disturbed reading of history” and “a slander on our great people.” 

Rob Berschinski, a former State Department official who is now senior vice president for policy at Human Rights First, said Pompeo’s remarks “loosely clothed a foray into the culture wars under the seal of the US State Department. It should rightfully be seen as a political speech unbecoming of a Secretary of State.” 

The speech, though, is just the culmination of a year’s worth of work that, while abstract in its consideration of the historical and philosophical roots of human rights, is intensely political. Across its five public meetings, which Huckerby and her colleagues at Duke Law analyzed in an article for Just Security, “religious freedom was clearly intended to be a core focus of the commission” and was “frequently discussed” by the commissioners, including in the context of when it clashes with the right to have an abortion.

There’s also the simple matter of who Pompeo chose to serve as commissioners, including chair Mary Ann Glendon, a former US ambassador to the Vatican who once said awarding the Pulitzer Prize to the Boston Globe for its coverage of sexual abuse by Catholic priests “would be like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Osama bin Laden.” (Pompeo, in his remarks on Thursday, noted that he once worked as Glendon’s research assistant, calling the experience “one of my life’s greatest gifts.”) The commissioners’ selection is also one reason several human rights advocacy organizations, including Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, sued Pompeo in March, alleging that the Commission on Unalienable Rights violates federal law requiring advisory bodies be independent and “fairly balanced among competing points of view.” 

“There is reason to believe the Secretary carefully selected the Commission members to yield a pre-determined result: constraining the understanding of ‘unalienable’ human rights to the narrow set of rights allegedly grounded in theories of natural law,” the lawsuit states

This, though, was of course the point. Just look at the reaction among Pompeo’s core group of supporters, the evangelical right, to see what was expected of this panel when it was announced last year. Back then, Tony Perkins, president of the right-wing Family Research Council, praised the newly-formed panel for “ensuring that the protection of these fundamental rights—the most foundational of which is freedom of religion or belief—is a core element of strategic policy discussions.” 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate