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In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with F. Cartwright Weiland about his article “Reflections of a Rapporteur,” one of a group of essays from Telos 192 (Fall 2020) on the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
Reflections of a Rapporteur
F. Cartwright Weiland
The locus of U.S. foreign policy plays second fiddle to its surroundings. “Main State,” an eight-story brutalist building in downtown Washington, is larger but plainer—less awe-inspiring—than the national shrine that sits across Constitution Avenue. That memorial, cut from Georgia marble, belongs to Old Abe and dominates the western edge of the National Mall. Its proximity and prominence are suggestive of a story that, until recently, had not been widely told: Our national past, as Faulkner would say, is not even past. It permeates the present, as domestic struggles regarding human rights, like Lincoln’s Civil War, provide the bearings for American diplomacy abroad.
That story was explored, over the course of a year, by the Commission on Unalienable Rights, an independent federal advisory committee composed of eleven men and women appointed by Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo in the summer of 2019. Their charge was simple but obscure: to provide the State Department with advice on how America’s distinctive rights tradition might serve as a guide for the government’s twenty-first-century foreign policy—and most importantly for its global advocacy for human rights.
The secretary’s and the chair of the commission’s view[1] was that the international human rights project had lost its moorings, as the fragile moral consensus that had developed after World War II, exemplified by the 1948 UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), had begun to fracture. The scope and limits of rights, seventy years after the UDHR, were contested. At the same time, some were alleging that the very concept of them was imperialistic—essentially a Western-dreamt mirage. Meanwhile, the proliferation of international treaties and resolutions had not prevented abhorrent violations of human rights.[2] Attentional disengagement and a general cultural malaise in many places had resulted in blindness, apathy, and diffidence. More than a third of the world’s population suffered under authoritarian regimes[3]—but how many knew that, cared, and responded with something other than a shrug? In swooped the commission, and American history, to the rescue.
But not everyone applauded. After the secretary’s announcement, the more curious and sophisticated skeptics worried that the commission had bitten off more than it could chew.[4] Others were not so much doubtful as alarmed. They saw the commission as a threat—a Trump administration–affiliated entity infringing on their turf. Since intense opposition, for this group, was predetermined, little attempt was made at finding common ground with the ideologically heterodox commissioners, who had agreed to serve their country more out of sheer interest and perceived obligation than from financial or reputational gain. (No commissioners received pay; some, behind the scenes, were professionally tarred and feathered for their involvement.)
Before long, takedowns were hurled by international NGOs. The public relations grenades were probably inevitable, given the partisan allegiances of NGOs’ employees and donor base. Their narrative hinged on commission motivations. For some, certain members’ religiosity was proof of the overall body’s zealotry[5]—even though some commissioners were secular and others did not subscribe to any particular orthodoxy; they were Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, and Mormon. Claiming federal notices to be secret code,[6] critics feared that the commission was a Pompeo-orchestrated cabal intended to rob homosexual and transgender individuals, as well as abortion-seeking women, of social approbation and court-established rights to marriage and free termination of their pregnancies.[7] Never mind that the commission’s focus was not on domestic policy, that it lacked authority to legislate or adjudicate changes to existing law, that its members’ political views and party affiliations were far from uniform, and that it had never aspired to settle heated culture war debates.
Even more perplexing were scholars and former government officials who themselves had identified problems with the international human rights project, but who nonetheless took umbrage at the commission’s focus on the same or related problems.[8] Members of Congress, meanwhile, denigrated the commissioners’ credentials[9] and yet revealingly considered the committee too important to merely ignore. In fact, Congress devoted serious time and attention to offering at least one important critique of the project. Various representatives warned the commission that its emphasis on America’s own rights tradition could backfire, since it was routine for governments in Beijing, Tehran, and Moscow to use sovereignty, national history, and cultural particularity to justify violent oppression.[10] (The Chinese, Iranian, and Russian sentiment being: “We have our own way of governing, and the rest of world doesn’t understand and, more, has no say over the matter.”) A legitimate question thus arose: Was the commission, by linking America’s unique civil rights struggles to human rights advocacy, inadvertently playing into autocrats’ hands?[11]
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1. The commission chair was Mary Ann Glendon, the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, a former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, and a well-known public intellectual whose interdisciplinary scholarship has been widely hailed for decades. Most relevant to the commission were Glendon’s works Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991), A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), and various writings on comparative constitutional law, such as “Rights in Twentieth-Century Constitutions,” University of Chicago Law Review 59, no. 1 (1992): 519–38.
2. One need not look very far for examples. Ours regrettably is a world where: children are arrested for scribbling on photographs of leaders; artists must ask for permission to exercise their creativity; young men are arrested not for committing actual crimes but rather for their alleged proclivity to commit future ones; pregnant women and young mothers are prohibited from pursuing their education; military conscription begins with government roundups, extends indefinitely, and never ends; and torture is more than an ugly word, happening in the form of induced asphyxiation, electric shock, and the breaking of bones. See Human Rights Watch, World Report 2019 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2019); and U.S. Department of State, 2019 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, March 11, 2020, https://www.state.gov/reports/2019-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/.
3. See “Global Democracy Has Another Bad Year,” Economist, January 22, 2020.
4. “Mary Ann Glendon on Unalienable Rights,” interview by Jack Goldsmith, Lawfare Podcast, August 3, 2019, podcast, MP3 audio, 33:51. Goldsmith described the commission’s project as “enormously ambitious,” representing a “life’s [worth of] work,” and “very hard.”
5. See, e.g., Masha Gessen, “Mike Pompeo’s Faith-Based Attempt to Narrowly Redefine Human Rights,” New Yorker, July 10, 2019.
6. Nahal Toosi, “State Department to Launch New Human Rights Panel Stressing ‘Natural Law,'” Politico, May 30, 2019.
7. See, e.g., the letter from 167 groups and individuals to the U.S. State Department Commission on Unalienable Rights, May 1, 2020, available online at Human Rights Watch. The Center for Reproductive Rights, Human Rights Watch, and International Women’s Health Coalition were the primary drafters.
8. In one example, Yale law professor Samuel Moyn was an early Twitter critic of the commission. Perhaps unbeknownst to him, though, his book Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2018) was considered by the commission, and reviews of the book were among commissioners’ required reading. In another example, former federal government officials Samantha Power and Susan Rice signed a letter calling for the commission to be disbanded. See the letter to Hon. Michael Pompeo, July 23, 2019, available online at Washington Blade. In their personal writings, however, each had drawn attention to various problems with the international human rights project, including NGO turf wars and the inefficacy of the United Nations. See Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2013), p. 75; Susan Rice, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), ch. 7.
9. Ali Rogin, “Members of New Pompeo Task Force Have Previously Praised Human Rights Abusers,” PBS NewsHour, July 10, 2019. Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) referred to commissioners as “second-rate academics.”
10. Ibid.
11. The answer, as it turned out, was “no.” See Peter Berkowitz, “The United States, National Traditions, and Human Rights,” Telos 192 (Fall 2020): 153–57.
Another significant challenge facing the U.S. global advocacy for human rights, not mentioned by F. Cartwright Wieland, is alluded to in some of the other comments of participants in the Forum on Universal Human Rights in Telos 192 on Truth and Power:
Russell Berman stated that “… it is indisputable that U.S. foreign policy should be significantly oriented towards rights promotion but that the pursuit of rights coexists with different interests of state, notably security and prosperity. Berman then mentions that China, in his judgment, is “… rapidly moving away from any semblance of human rights: surveillance state everywhere.”
David Pan has also mentioned in his essay that “…without the subordination of rulers to laws and elections and the ability of all people to think and express themselves according to their conscience, factions are sometimes able to establish a tyrannical rule over the rest of the population.”
If a faction of hybrid public/private power concentrations utilizing the U.S. bureaucracies of intelligence, diplomacy and financial management within our sovereign state are now moving toward an attempt at more permanent political control in both American foreign policy as well as domestic economic and cultural policy, including the promulgation of an hegemonic identity politics narrative, then a possible result could be the same “surveillance state everywhere,” model of our Chinese adversaries, culminating in the passing of the “joys and gratifications of free company and an endorsement of “the pleasures of holding dominion.”