The Foreign Service Journal, June 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2020 33 FDRPRESIDENTIALLIBRARYANDMUSEUM Eleanor Roosevelt, president of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, holds a poster of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in November 1949. The United Nations General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, France, on Dec. 10, 1948. STF/AFP/GETTY IMAGES The Commission on Unalienable Rights When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched the Com- mission on Unalienable Rights in 2018, he acknowledged the “truly great achievements” of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But he conspicuously omitted the United States’ founding commitment to a “more Perfect Union”—an America built on inclusion and diversity that grants equal citizenship to minorities of color, women, the disabled, children, LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups. Instead, the commis- sion has focused narrowly on religious freedom, not sustaining a global effort to protect all rights for all people. Some commission members seemmore focused on limiting women’s reproductive rights and the rights of LGBTQ persons than on protecting an inclusive basket of 21st-century identities, activities and liberties. U.S. law requires that a federal advisory committee “be fairly balanced in its membership in terms of the points of view rep- resented and the functions to be performed”; but the commis- sion’s composition visibly lacks ideological diversity. In erect- ing this unneeded body, the administration has both diverted much-needed resources from and sidelined career human rights experts in the State Department’s own Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the dedicated entity charged by law with advising the Secretary on human rights issues. The 1993 Vienna Declaration of Human Rights famously recognized that “all human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis.” But the com- mission’s initial meetings suggest that, instead, it is picking and choosing among those rights it chooses to deem “unalienable”— particularly religious freedom and, within that, Judeo-Christian freedom—and those it now deems “ad hoc,” establishing the kind of artificial hierarchy of rights usually mouthed by autocrats. Yet like all governments, the United States is legally bound