Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a repudiation of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s commission on rights that the United States and its allies say should not be taken away at the unveiling of the State Department’s 2020 report on human rights.
“One of the core principles of human rights is that they are universal,” Blinken told reporters on Tuesday at the State Department. “All people are entitled to these rights, no matter where they’re born, what they believe, whom they love, or any other characteristic.”
Pompeo convened an advisory Commission on Unalienable Rights on the theory that “there is far too little agreement anymore on what an unalienable right truly is,” a circumstance that allowed malign governments to subvert the concept for their own abuses. The ensuing report distinguished between fundamental human rights and other issues that could be the subjects of legitimate political debate, but Blinken sided with the critics who argued that the report would ease authoritarian efforts to subvert human rights concepts to justify their abuses.
“There is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others,” Blinken said. “Past unbalanced statements that suggest such a hierarchy, including those offered by a recently disbanded State Department advisory committee, do not represent a guiding document for this administration.”
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The Pompeo commission’s report identified such a hierarchy in the history of U.S. government invocations of human rights to justify new policy initiatives, such as the New Deal pledges made by former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“Social and economic rights are most compatible with American founding principles when they serve as minimums that enable citizens to exercise their unalienable rights, discharge their responsibilities, and engage in self-government,” the Commission on Unalienable Rights claimed. “They are least compatible when they induce dependence on the state, and when, by expanding state power, they curtail freedom — from the rights of property and religious liberty to those of individuals to form and maintain families and communities.”
Pompeo argued that these distinctions were necessary to advance human rights abroad.
“When rights proliferate, we risk losing focus on those core unalienable rights — the ones that we would give everything for,” he said at Kansas State University in 2019. “This confusion has opened the door for countless countries that don’t share our respect for human rights to use corrupt understandings of this notion to achieve their evil ends.”
Blinken’s rejection of that idea emerged out of a dispute recognized by the commission, which acknowledged that “commissioners, like our fellow Americans, are not of one mind on many issues where there are conflicting interpretations of human rights claims — abortion, affirmative action, and capital punishment, to name a few.”
The significance of those disputes was underscored when Blinken reversed a second Pompeo-era judgment about human rights on Tuesday, this one pertaining to “reproductive health, including information about maternal mortality, discrimination against women in accessing sexual and reproductive healthcare, and government policies about access to contraception and skilled healthcare during pregnancy and childbirth.”
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He faulted Pompeo for eliminating that section from State Department human rights reports and promised to publish an addendum to the 2020 report featuring information about those issues.
“And we are restoring the practice of documenting these rights in 2021 and future years,” he said. “It is one of many steps, along with revoking the Mexico City policy, withdrawing from the Geneva Consensus Declaration, and resuming support for the United Nations Population Fund, that we are taking to promote women’s health and equity at home and abroad. Because women’s rights, including sexual and reproductive rights, are human rights.”
