The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

22 SEPTEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL SPEAKING OUT How to Strengthen Human Rights Diplomacy BY SAMUE L C . DOWN I NG Samuel C. Downing is a political officer in the U.S. Foreign Service. He currently works on human rights policy toward Venezuela and the Andean region, Brazil and Mexico for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. He previ- ously served in Cambodia and Brazil and was a Fulbright Fellow in Uruguay. He began his career in government in Seattle and later managed democracy assistance programs for the National Democratic Institute. The views in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of State or U.S. government. C entral to the American experi- ment is the struggle for greater freedom. Thomas Jefferson’s revolutionary assertion that “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”—not to glorify kings or even to pave highways, but rather “to secure these rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happi- ness”—is as revolutionary today as it was in 1776. If the purpose of our government is to protect human rights, surely that should be the purpose of our diplomacy, too. When America acts to advance our values and not just our interests, we strengthen our diplomatic clout on the world stage. Promoting our values is what makes American diplomacy unique—and uniquely challenging. Advocating for human rights triggers passionate defenses from foreign officials steeped in cultural contexts different from our own. Progress on human rights defies easy measure. It tends to be incremental. An intrepid human rights officer, often the junior member of the political section, must swim against the tide of bureaucratic resistance from the prin- ciple—oft stated, but rarely supported by evidence—that pushing our human rights agenda too hard or too fast will put other areas of cooperation at risk. Though for the past several decades there has been a clear bipartisan con- sensus for promoting human rights and democracy abroad, and many members of the Foreign Service are called to dip- lomatic work because of their interest in human rights, the management struc- ture for human rights work at the State Department does not reflect this mandate and tends to disempower those who pur- sue it. Our bureaucratic arrangements act to marginalize human rights work. Here are five proposed adjustments that could restore both its priority and effectiveness. 1. Rate Senior Officers on How They Do on Human Rights First, we need to align the incentives for senior officers to focus more of their energy on democracy and human rights. Too often, senior officers prioritize issues where results are easier to quantify, like opening foreign markets to U.S. compa- nies or securing a status of forces agree- ment with a host government. These are important but obvious areas of focus for performance evaluations. But the unique priorities of U.S. diplomacy are democracy and human rights, and performance evaluations for senior offi- cials should reflect that fact explicitly. Performance pay for members of the Senior Foreign Service should be linked, in part, to achievements related to human rights and democracy. Employee evalu- ation reports (EERs) for chiefs of mission and their deputies, and for assistant sec- retaries and their deputies, should require examples related to democracy and human rights. Promotion panels should be directed to base decisions, in part, on such achievements. 2. Regrade Human Rights Positions Foreign governments get the message that human rights don’t really matter when the most junior officer at the embassy is our main human rights advocate. Human rights diplomacy requires a mastery of the core competencies we expect FSOs to develop over the course of their careers, yet most human rights positions are entry-level. The effect of this mismatch between responsibility and capability is to undercut the importance accorded to human rights in the concep- tion and execution of U.S. foreign policy. A human rights officer is better able to push back against bureaucratic inertia and reflexive concerns about “preserving the relationship” if she sits on the country team than if she sits on the committee of first- and second-tour officers (FAST). One component of a human rights officer’s job is drafting the annual human rights report on the host country. One of the department’s most widely read and influential reporting documents, it can be