REVIEW - Pompeo's 'Unalienable' Rights Commission Sparks Ideological Feud In US

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 20th July, 2020) A new US State Department human rights report has come under fire from activists who fear it will undermine issues such as gender and racial equality while conservative defenders see it as a welcome alternative to inept multilateral institutions.

Last week, the State Department unveiled a draft report by the US Commission on Unalienable Rights, a body designed as an alternative to the UN Human Rights Council, which the United States withdrew from in 2018.

The commission was established by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last year to review how to incorporate human rights into US foreign policy in a way that "serves American interests," according to the report.

Pompeo during a speech in Philadelphia last week marking the launch of the report accused the UN body of doing the "bidding of dictators" and alleged that Nicaragua, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Iran, Russia, Myanmar, China, and North Korea are among the world's worst human rights abusers.

During his remarks Pompeo criticized The New York Times' 1619 Project on the history of slavery for suggesting that the United States was founded on "human bondage." Pompeo said it was a disturbing reading of history and slanders the American people.

The report underscores the need to protect religious freedom and property rights around the world. The report also described issues like abortion, racial equality and same-sex marriage as "divisive social and political controversies."

On Saturday, prominent international relations scholar David Rothkopf accused Pompeo of outdoing US President Donald Trump in trying to stoke racial tensions.

"He [Pompeo] is combining the racism of the 19th century with the theocracy of the 14th century, and leavening it with rewriting much of the history that happened in between," Rothkopf said in an op-ed for Haaertz.

Human Rights First in a statement described the commission as a political exercise designed by Pompeo to "recast American foreign policy in the mold of his personal religious and political views."

US Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) President Serra Sippel said the report was not produced with principles of equality, justice, and human rights in mind.

"Instead, it serves as another stepping stone in the White House's radical, isolationist, anti-rights, anti-scientific, religious agenda," Sippel said in a statement.

Amnesty International called Pompeo's effort "a dangerous political stunt" that will simply enable "human rights-abusing governments around the world."

Ranking Senate Foreign Relations committee member Bob Menendez said the US must not neglect universal values that include protecting gender, racial, and ethnic rights.

"Pompeo used his speech to insinuate a hierarchy of rights where property rights and religious liberty are 'foremost' rights and some rights are not 'worth defending,'" Menendez said in a statement after the Secretary of State's speech.

Meanwhile, several other critics accused the State Department of hypocrisy for claiming to be champions of human rights just as the United States is undergoing nationwide protests over police brutality.

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board defended Pompeo's report and slammed the left for its "unhinged response" to the project.

The board argued that the progressives are the ones that are trying to enable dictators.

"The State Department commission draws a distinction between civil and political rights, such as freedom of speech and equality before the law, and 'economic and social rights.' The latter, like the right to a state pension or to abortion, may be valued by citizens and enacted by governments. But they are not fundamental to a free society in the same way as the unalienable rights the American founders sought to protect," the editorial board said.

The editorial also said the global human-rights cause is "fractured and impotent" and warned about the perils of focusing on economic and social rights versus fundamental political freedoms.

"This plays into the hands of dictators who can argue, like the Soviet Union during the Cold War, that their people enjoy more 'rights' even as they live under tyranny," the editorial said.

A writer for the conservative magazine The National Review also claimed that the left's criticism will only embolden tyrannical governments.

"The Chinese Communist Party, for example, asserts the primacy of economic and social rights, justifying political crackdowns in the name of economic development. However, the critics fail to grasp that these regimes will continue to abuse human rights no matter the hierarchy of rights shaping the work of American diplomats," National Review Institute Fellow in Political Journalism, Jimmy Quinn, wrote in an op-ed on July 17.

Pompeo's move can also be seen as the logical culmination of the mindset of American exceptionalism. Some scholars have long argued that the main problem is the US impulse to try and impose Western-defined values onto other countries and cultures it does not understand.

Pompeo's report appears to be an extremely partisan manifestation of a very American practice - a byproduct of the State Department's structure, culture and longstanding policies.

This approach has also been described as a hardly-disguised mechanism to undermine and subjugate other nations. The United States has a long track record of cynically using human rights as a weapon while downplaying its own transgressions.