U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Monday the creation of a State Department panel to review unalienable rights in U.S. foreign policy.
The panel, which Pompeo said will consist of human rights experts and activists, will be lead by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican during the George W. Bush administration.
“As human rights claims have proliferated, some claims have come into tension with one another provoking questions and clashes about which rights are entitled to gain respect,” Pompeo said while speaking with reporters.
“Nation states and international institutions remain confused about the respective responsibilities concerning human rights. … The time is right for an informed review of the role of human rights in American foreign policy.”
Although critics of the administration have accused the Trump administration of inadequately considering human rights in its foreign policy, they have also branded the upcoming panel as “hateful.”
“This politicization of human rights in order to, what appears to be an attempt to further hateful policies aimed at women and LGBTQ people, is shameful,” said Joanne Lin, the national director of advocacy and government affairs at Amnesty International USA.
Pompeo avoided giving specific tasks of the panel but said he hopes the commission will conduct “one of the most profound reexaminations of the unalienable rights in the world since the 1948 universal declaration.”
