Mike Pompeo Brought His Backward View of Human Rights to the UN. Europe Wasn’t Buying It.

France, Germany, and Great Britain declined to support the State Department’s new vision.

Andrew Harnik/AFP/Getty

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

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged foreign leaders to “secure unalienable rights” in a United Nations speech on Wednesday, which laid the “crisis” in international human rights at the feet of longtime American adversaries and multilateral bodies like the UN. “Authoritarian governments, from China to Iran to Venezuela, are depriving our fellow human beings of their basic rights,” he said. “Meanwhile, many multinational organizations have lost their way, focusing on partisan policy preferences while failing to defend fundamental rights.”

Pompeo’s speech, which was part of an event hosted by the United States during the UN General Assembly, was marketed as a celebration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundational document for decades of human rights policy. Instead, Pompeo promoted his own narrowly-defined idea of human rights, which was formalized last month in a report from a controversial State Department advisory body. Known as the Commission on Unalienable Rights, the group was stocked with critics of contraception, same-sex marriage, and abortion, including Pompeo’s former boss. In its final report, which was released last month, the commission elevated some rights like religious freedom as “unalienable,” while dismissing abortion and same-sex marriages as “divisive social and political controversies.” 

Since the publication of the report, Pompeo has wasted no time promoting it on the world stage. Last week, the US delegation to the UN office in Geneva staged a virtual event with two commission leaders to “explain” the report. Ahead of Pompeo’s speech on Wednesday, State Department officials solicited support from the European Union for its human rights commission, but once that met with a tepid response, “rebranded their outreach efforts” around the Universal Declaration for Human Rights,” the New York Times reported. That recruitment method still failed to get any major European allies to sign a joint statement, released by the State Department, promoting the view that individual countries should “recognize the many differences in our cultural, political, legal, religious, and other traditions, yet reaffirm fundamental freedoms and rights for all.” Traditional US allies such as Great Britain, France, Germany, and Canada did not sign the document, but countries with notoriously poor human rights records like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates did.

“You can tell a US priority initiative on human rights is wildly off-track when it attracts support from Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, but not Sweden, Norway, France, or the UK,” Rob Berschinski, senior vice president for policy at Human Rights First, told me. 

For as much as Pompeo wants to batter US adversaries like China and Venezuela, it’s his own flexible definition of human rights that is most attractive to authoritarian leaders. In his speech, Pompeo said the commission’s report should “serve as an inspiration to other nations and people all across the world,” adding, “they should turn to their traditions and rededicate themselves to their moral, philosophical, and religious resources to reaffirm the rights that are inherent in all persons.” This idea—that countries can use their own cultural norms as a bulwark against the global human rights consensus—is “exactly what the governments in Beijing and Tehran want to hear,” Berschinski said. “They will no doubt use this message to ignore calls to stop abusing their citizens.”

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