Although U.S. President Donald Trump has said little or nothing in public about defending human rights and freedoms abroad, both of his administrations have taken steps to reform the way that the United States defines and upholds those rights. At the same time, cuts to foreign aid and other international outreach programs\u2014as well as Trump\u2019s attacks on constitutional governance and the rule of law\u2014threaten to undermine the United States\u2019 most effective means of promoting and defending basic rights and freedoms:\u00a0its soft power and the power of example.<\/p>\n
The first Trump administration denounced the United Nation\u2019s hypocrisy on human rights, withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council when the call for reforming its autocracy-heavy membership was rejected. The U.S. State Department defended basic freedoms by confronting China, Venezuela, Syria, and other countries about abuses; leading a major international push for religious freedom; and promoting women\u2019s economic empowerment.<\/p>\n
Although U.S. President Donald Trump has said little or nothing in public about defending human rights and freedoms abroad, both of his administrations have taken steps to reform the way that the United States defines and upholds those rights. At the same time, cuts to foreign aid and other international outreach programs\u2014as well as Trump\u2019s attacks on constitutional governance and the rule of law\u2014threaten to undermine the United States\u2019 most effective means of promoting and defending basic rights and freedoms:\u00a0its soft power and the power of example.<\/p>\n
The first Trump administration denounced the United Nation\u2019s hypocrisy on human rights, withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council when the call for reforming its autocracy-heavy membership was rejected. The U.S. State Department defended basic freedoms by confronting China, Venezuela, Syria, and other countries about abuses; leading a major international push for religious freedom; and promoting women\u2019s economic empowerment.<\/p>\n
Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established a Commission on Unalienable Rights, charging it with \u201cproviding the U.S. government with advice on human rights grounded in our nation\u2019s founding principles and the principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights\u201d and creating a \u201cserious debate about human rights that extends across party lines and national borders.\u201d In announcing the project<\/a>, Pompeo distinguished between fundamental rights enshrined by the country\u2019s founders\u2014including the famous right to \u201clife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness\u201d\u2014and a subsequent proliferation of \u201cad hoc rights granted by governments,\u201d especially since the end of the Cold War.<\/p>\n More than 200 human rights organizations immediately denounced the project as promoting a hierarchy of rights and rejected the idea that the expansion and codification of rights had weakened protection of basic liberties. Activists were appalled<\/a> by the State Department\u2019s reference<\/a> to \u201cnatural law and natural rights,\u201d which they saw as code for a rollback of women\u2019s rights and same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n The U.N.\u2019s Universal Declaration of Human Rights reflects the principle that to be legitimate, human rights need to be seen as rising out of all the world\u2019s traditions. It thus includes both negative liberties that require the state to abstain from restrictions\u2014such as free speech, freedom of assembly, and equal treatment of all citizens\u2014and positive \u201ceconomic, social and cultural rights\u201d that require government action\u2014for example, to ensure access to food, education, medical care, clothing, housing, and an \u201cadequate standard of living.\u201d<\/p>\n All of these require the redistribution of wealth by governments. And new U.N. treaties are in the pipeline, including one on the rights of the elderly. The U.N. General Assembly has also made declarations<\/a> regarding humanity\u2019s right to a \u201chealthy environment\u201d and \u201cstable climate,\u201d and U.N. committees regularly produce proposals to codify more rights, such as a \u201cright to sanitation<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n This vast profusion of positive rights reflects an ideological instrumentalization of the concept of human rights and is, arguably, incompatible with the classical liberalism that shaped U.S. democracy. Pompeo\u2019s concern about the proliferation of new human rights suggested that the Commission on Unalienable Rights would recenter U.S. policy on fundamental civil rights and freedoms\u2014and to question the validity of an ever-larger bouquet of economic and social rights as genuine human rights.<\/p>\n But the commission\u2019s final report<\/a>, surprisingly, endorsed the inclusion of economic and social rights in international legislation as fully consistent with the United States\u2019 foundational creed. U.S. human rights policy has been ambivalent about economic and social human rights, assuming a range of postures; since 1948, it was the Reagan administration that most clearly articulated a principled definition of human rights that focused on inherent liberties. It is ironic that while conservative administrations have ensured that the United States has never ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Pompeo commission\u2019s report could provide support for its future ratification.<\/p>\n The second Trump administration is talking less about human rights than the first, but it is doing more to change U.S. policy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is proposing to revolutionize Washington\u2019s approach as one that defends basic freedoms and not the expansive notion of international human rights contained in the Universal Declaration, U.N. treaties, and soft law. Rubio\u2019s State Department is setting up<\/a> an Office of Natural Rights to support \u201cvalues-based diplomacy in traditional western conceptions of core freedoms.\u201d These values will no longer be promoted via multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, but through the State Department\u2019s embassies and regional bureaus.<\/p>\n Like Pompeo\u2019s Commission on Unalienable Rights, Rubio\u2019s proposals have aroused strong criticism from the human rights establishment\u2014activists who have built careers linked to the vast international human rights bureaucracy and advocate for compliance with international law. Rarely do they reference the classical foundations of human rights, which support a much narrower range of inherent liberties.<\/p>\n Some took particular offense at the State Department\u2019s mention of Western conceptions of freedom. Such language \u201cis a complete gift to governments that commit human rights violations worldwide, who often resist U.S human rights efforts on the very basis that the U.S. is foisting foreign values on them,\u201d\u00a0according<\/a>\u00a0to Scott Busby and Charles O. Blaha, writing in Just Security. But in a statement commemorating China\u2019s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators, Rubio clarified<\/a> that\u00a0\u201cthe principles of freedom, democracy, and self-rule are not just American principles. They are human principles.\u201d<\/p>\n But how will the United States actually promote and defend these principles that it holds universal?\u00a0In defenestrating broadly conceived human rights in favor of a narrower core of natural rights\u2014and bypassing international human rights legislation and institutions, Rubio\u2019s proposals imply a return not only to America\u2019s traditional concept of natural rights, but also a return to how\u00a0U.S. leaders defended them throughout most of the country\u2019s history. The new United States projected the ideals of liberty and democracy, in the words of Thomas Jefferson<\/a>, \u201cto struggling nations who wish, like us, to emerge from their tyrannies also.\u201d After World War II, the liberal political system enjoyed by Americans became a model for Western Europe as it emerged from totalitarianism and war. The Reagan administration\u2019s emphasis on political freedoms and their universal nature significantly undermined the Soviet empire, thus contributing to the West\u2019s victory in the Cold War.<\/p>\n With authoritarianism on the march, promoting natural rights ought to mean more than schooling<\/a> allied democracies about how their efforts to combat hate speech infringe on the freedom of expression. In 35 years working in the international human rights community, I have never heard any of its members mention \u201cnatural rights.\u201d But the United States government should revive the concept, as the reported establishment of an Office of Natural Rights suggests may now be in the offing. It could promote natural rights abroad\u2014not by lecturing other governments, but by projecting these principles through media and educational opportunities for civil society, incorporating American civilians in the process. Rubio\u2019s initiative could help bring natural rights alive as a principle that can catalyze political change, as opposed to U.N.-defined human rights, which are often manipulated to support the political zeitgeist and various policy goals.<\/p>\n But to do so, resources would need to be devoted to U.S. soft power, such as Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty<\/a>, whose funding has been cut. Voice of America would need to be retained as a voice for inherent, universal, unalienable rights. If the administration is serious about promoting and defending natural rights, then it will need to reinforce the distinction between liberty and tyranny in its dealings with other states, not shying away<\/a> from telling the truth about violations of natural rights such as stolen elections.<\/p>\n And to effectively promote natural rights around the world, the administration itself will need to show more respect for fundamental constitutional principles including the rule of law, the separation of powers, and habeas corpus at home. That way, the United States\u2019 example can be its most effective human rights policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Although U.S. President Donald Trump has said little or nothing in public about defending human rights and freedoms…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[32,19665,4582,1166,1771,49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-288795","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-homepage_regional_americas","10":"tag-human-rights","11":"tag-trump-administration","12":"tag-u-s-foreign-policy","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114910106110047020","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}