Secretary of State Establishes Commission on Unalienable Rights

On July 8, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established a Commission on Unalienable Rights. The Commission will “provide the Secretary of State advice and recommendations concerning international human rights matters … [and] provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation's founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”¹ The Commission has an initial two-year mandate. Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns that the Commission will circumvent existing structures and challenge LGBTQ+ protections and reproductive rights.

In May 2019, Pompeo gave formal notice of his intent to establish a Commission on Unalienable Rights, pursuant to the Federal Advisory Committee Act.² On July 8, he announced the creation of the Commission.³ The Commission will study the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Founding-era documents to produce a written guide that, as Pompeo describes it, “the State Department and every American can stare at and say this is consistent with American history.”⁴ The Commission will automatically be dissolved after two years unless “it is formally determined to be in the public interest to continue it for another two years.”⁵

Pompeo emphasized that the Commission is intended to ensure that “human rights discourse not be corrupted or hijacked or used for dubious or malignant purposes,” explaining:

It's a sad commentary on our times that more than 70 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, gross violations continue throughout the world, sometimes even in the name of human rights. International institutions designed and built to protect human rights have drifted from their original mission. 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. …

I hope that the commission will revisit the most basic of questions: What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right? How do we know or how do we determine whether that claim that this or that is a human right, is it true, and therefore, ought it to be honored? How can there be human rights, rights we possess not as privileges we are granted or even earn, but simply by virtue of our humanity belong to us? Is it, in fact, true, as our Declaration of Independence asserts, that as human beings, we—all of us, every member of our human family—are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights?⁶

In a newspaper editorial published around the same time, Pompeo wrote:

[A]fter the Cold War ended, many human-rights advocates turned their energy to new categories of rights. These rights often sound noble and just. But when politicians and bureaucrats create new rights, they blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights granted by governments. Unalienable rights are by nature universal. Not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right. Loose talk of “rights” unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy. … Rights claims are often aimed more at rewarding interest groups and dividing humanity into subgroups. … The commission's work could also help reorient international institutions specifically tasked to protect human rights, like the United Nations, back to their original missions.⁷

The Commission currently consists of ten individuals appointed by Pompeo.⁸ The Commission's chair is Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard Law professor and former ambassador to the Vatican.⁹ Glendon stated that, under her leadership, the Commission will focus on “principle[s], not polic[ies],” drawn from the “distinctive rights tradition of the United States of America.”¹⁰

The Commission's creation dismayed a substantial number of Democratic members of Congress, who described its premises as an “Orwellian twist to defend the indefensible”¹¹ and characterized it as an “attempt to make an end run around career experts, statutorily established State Department structures, and widely accepted interpretations of human rights law to push a narrow, discriminatory agenda that decides whose rights are worth protecting and whose rights the Administration will ignore.”¹² They also criticized Pompeo for withholding information about the Commission from Congress until the day he publicly announced the creation of the Commission.¹³ And they questioned the redundancy of the Commission in light of the “career, non-partisan human rights experts” at the State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) and the Office of the Legal Adviser.¹⁴ The lawmakers further warned that the Commission could be used to denigrate LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.¹⁵ In addition to vocalizing their objections, Democratic legislators are seeking to block funding for the Commission through Congress's power of the purse.¹⁶