The Foreign Service Journal, June 2020

30 JUNE 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL ment in Foreign Affairs : “Much of the human rights community has not only shied away from expressing qualms about rights proliferation, it has often led the process [of deemphasizing rights proliferation].” In addition to adding rights, activists have been selective in their promotion of rights, often emphasiz- ing new or novel interpretations of rights. For example, human rights advocates often promote LGBT rights, though these rights do not appear in international agreements, while ignoring or downplaying the importance of religious freedom rights, which are included in international agreements. These changes in focus were accompanied by significant shifts in ambition, especially after the end of the Cold War. As Secretary of State Michael Pompeo noted in a July 7, 2019, opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal , “Human-rights advocacy has lost its bearings and become more of an industry than a moral com- pass.” Western human rights organizations worked to enlarge the international legal infrastructure that supported their efforts, creating state-like institutions such as the International Criminal Court and doctrines such as the “Responsibility to Protect” (which obligates the international community to intervene in states to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity) without clearly limiting their scope and ensuring they would not be politicized. The assumption that Western—Ameri- can—power would be sufficient to ensure these worked as adver- tised was unrealistic from the start—and certainly impossible today given the geopolitical landscape. American Leadership and a Return to Basics The U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, established by Secretary of State Pompeo in 2019, offers an opportunity for the United States to reverse the declining legitimacy of the human rights idea. The commission is designed “not to discover new principles but to ground our discussion of human rights in America’s founding principles,” and to “generate a serious debate about human rights that extends across party lines and national borders,” as the Secretary explains in his WSJ article . The United States is uniquely positioned to restore the role of the Universal Declaration given its historic leadership as a driving force behind the declaration’s adoption and its still- leading role as promoter of human rights worldwide. Accordingly, the United States should promote a return to basics: the handful of rights prioritized and given little scope for flexibility by the drafters of the declaration. The list, which could be augmented through negotiations, must include protections against genocide; slavery; torture; cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; retroactive penal measures; deporta- tion or forcible transfer of population; discrimination based on race, color, sex, language, religion, nationality or social origin; and protection for freedom of conscience and religion. This would create a human rights framework that transcends political and cultural perspectives—one that could gain close to universal support because it would stick to what is needed to establish a just society in which every person could live with dignity. It would dampen much of the backlash that the human rights community has generated in many countries outside the West because it would appeal to a core set of values that are shared across groups and cultures and not seek to remake any group or part of the world in a Western image of society. While some claim that this approach will make it difficult to check rights abuses, the reverse is true. A modest understand- ing of which rights can claim to be universal will encourage far greater scrutiny of those rights, from a far greater number of actors, especially within each society. The United States would end up taking a harder line on a few core issues everywhere— including with allies—but directly challenge the authority of fewer regimes than it does today, taking a more agnostic attitude to how they organize themselves and address myriad problems. In many places, this would also make cooperation to advance core rights more likely, because the focus would not be on regime change but on regime improvement. As the world becomes more multipolar, and thus less deter- mined by Western power, the need to take into account non- Western value systems, ideas and ways of organizing society will only grow. Whereas the human rights community provides little scope for incorporating such changes—because it is both uncom- promisingly broad and rigid—the United States can offer a new framework that accepts the need for local adaptation and reserves universality to a select group of rights, offering a much better base to preserve the importance of human rights on the global stage going forward. The State Department’s Commission on Unalien- able Rights offers just such an opportunity. n The number of rights has risen steeply as various well-meaning special interest groups have sought to harness the moral authority of the human rights idea to their causes.