On July 4th, President Trump held just one telephone call with a foreign leader—President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, of Egypt, a former field marshal who has orchestrated two military coups since 2011 and now ranks as the most autocratic leader in his country’s modern history. A week earlier, at the G-20 summit of world leaders in Japan, Trump joked with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, about the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election and expressed envy that his counterpart did not have to deal with “fake news.” (Twenty-six journalists have been murdered in Russia since Putin first became President.) The next day, Trump heaped praise on Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince tied by U.S. intelligence and a recent U.N. report to the grisly murder and dismemberment of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A day later, the President stepped into North Korea to reward Kim Jong Un, the world’s most authoritarian despot, with a handshake and the promise of better relations. The President has had few qualms about cozying up to dictators. He has other favorites, including Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in Turkey, and Rodrigo Duterte, in the Philippines.
So on Monday, to choruses of disbelief in Washington and around the world, the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, announced that the Administration was creating a new commission to explore “unalienable rights” in U.S. foreign policy. “The time is right for an informed review of the role of human rights,” Pompeo told reporters. The United States must, he said, “be vigilant that human-rights discourse not be corrupted or hijacked or used for dubious or malignant purposes.” He vowed that the ten-member panel would provide the most comprehensive review since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (an effort chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt) was adopted by the United Nations, in 1948.
In fact, however, the commission’s charter, first posted briefly on the Federal Register in May, made no mention of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It instead cited the need for new discourse on deviations from “natural law.” Its language invoked rights only as “God-given”; it implicitly challenged man-made laws as well as decisions by the Supreme Court on abortion, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage.
The original language so alarmed five senior Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that they wrote Pompeo an open letter, last month, warning that the term “natural law” has previously justified discrimination against marginalized populations. After Pompeo’s announcement on Monday, human-rights groups charged that the Administration was trying to redefine what a right is—potentially in ways that deny a woman’s right to choose and that target rather than protect minorities, especially the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
“It’s no secret that this White House administration will stop at nothing to roll back the health and human rights our country has worked for decades to establish for women and the LGBTQI+ community,” Serra Sippel, the president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, said in a statement. “It’s time to call the Commission on Unalienable Rights what it really is: a thinly veiled religious fundamentalist panel that aims to cut back the human rights of people all over the world.”
The new panel reflects the evangelical undercurrent in Trump’s tiny inner circle that has grown stronger since Pompeo took the helm at State, in April of last year. Pompeo has repeatedly invoked Biblical references in defining the Trump Administration’s foreign policy. “The distinctive mark of Western civilization is the belief in the inherent worth of human beings, with the attendant respect for God-authored rights and liberties,” he said, in a speech at the Claremont Institute, in May. In a speech in Cairo, in January, Pompeo told a predominantly Muslim audience that he kept a Bible open on his desk “to remind me of God and His Word, and The Truth.” Last month, Slate chronicled how evangelicals, including Pompeo and the Vice-President, Mike Pence, have helped define U.S. foreign policy as “the God Doctrine.”
The panel’s mission is underscored by the chairperson that Pompeo appointed: the conservative Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican during the George W. Bush Administration. In 2009, Glendon turned down a coveted honor from the University of Notre Dame, because President Barack Obama was giving the commencement address and she opposed his position on abortion. In a public letter, she scolded “Notre Dame’s decision—in disregard of the settled position of the U.S. bishops—to honor a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church’s position on issues involving fundamental principles of justice.” At the groundbreaking U.N. World Conference on Women, in 1995, she lobbied hard to prevent abortion from being declared a woman’s right—and her view prevailed.
Under Trump, the United States has eroded U.S. human-rights commitments and practices more than any Administration in the seven decades since the Universal Declaration became international law. In 2017, the former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that human rights were no longer a top U.S. priority. “If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we’ve come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national-security interests, our economic interests,” he told members of his staff. A year later, the Administration pulled out of the U.N. Human Rights Council that investigates abuses. It cited the U.N.’s “excessive” criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the general hypocrisy among member states. It also cut funding for the U.N. Population Fund based on its support for a program of “coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization”—a description that the U.N. has denied. The Administration’s sweeping visa ban on citizens from a half-dozen Muslim countries led to charges of religious discrimination. Its immigration policy—especially the treatment of migrant children on the Mexican border—has triggered allegations of violating basic human decency. On Monday, Michelle Bachelet, the former President of Chile who is now the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that she was stunned by U.S. practices. “I am deeply shocked that children are forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded facilities, without access to adequate health care or food, and with poor sanitation conditions,” she said, in a statement.
Trump’s policies have undermined principles central to America’s creation. “The extent to which this Administration has undermined American leadership and credibility on promoting fundamental human rights is of historic proportions,” the five Democratic senators charged bluntly in their letter to Pompeo. Columbia University’s Human Rights Law Review runs the “Trump Human Rights Tracker” with regular updates on the Administration’s actions. “It is difficult to keep up with all that the new administration is doing that threatens human rights,” the Web site begins.
Human-rights groups were either skeptical or scathing about the new commission’s commitment to protecting more people or entrenching freedoms in more countries. Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, expressed concern about the Administration’s distinction between “unalienable rights” and “ad-hoc rights,” as well as its “seemingly permissive stance on a variety of human-rights abuses” around the world. “The United States cannot effectively promote individual liberty, human equality, or democracy by narrowing the definition of human rights to exclude broad categories of rights or people,” Abramowitz told me.
Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, went further. “We don’t need a commission to figure out that the Trump administration will have little credibility promoting human rights so long as the President continues to embrace autocrats,” he told me. Trump is “evidently envious of their ability to silence or compromise the checks and balances on their authority, such as the independent judges, probing journalists, and pesky activists who are essential to democracy.” Amnesty International warned that the Administration’s approach could encourage other nations to “disregard for basic human-rights standards” and even risk weakening international treaties. Over time, the President’s embrace of autocrats and his dismissal of human rights could put the lives of millions of people around the world—including Americans—in jeopardy.
