Somebody hand Antony Blinken the report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He needs to give it a look.
Somebody hand Antony Blinken the report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He needs to give it a look. In his remarks Tuesday presenting the latest Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the secretary of State took a gratuitous swipe at the commission, which his predecessor Mike Pompeo established in 2019 to review the connections between America’s constitutional principles, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and U.S. foreign policy.
Blinken said that human rights are universal, co-equal, and non-hierarchical. “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,” he went on. “At my confirmation hearing, I promised that the Biden-Harris administration would repudiate those unbalanced views. We do so decisively today.”
What was unbalanced was Blinken’s attitude toward the commission. Its report explicitly affirms that the “human rights in the Universal Declaration have an integrated character and are not meant to be severed from or pitted against one another, as all reflect in some degree the requirements of human dignity.” It says that “The United States and every other state that has taken on international commitments are obligated to fulfill all of those commitments, with no cultural exceptions.”
But it also makes the following common sense observation: Policymakers draw distinctions between, say, which rights are worth going to war over and which are not. “U.S. foreign policy can and should, consistent with the UDHR, determine which rights most accord with national principles, priorities, and interests at any given time,” says the report. “Such judgments must take into consideration both the distinctive American contributions to the human rights project and also prudential judgments about current conditions, threats, and opportunities.”
That doesn’t read like the “unbalanced” rant of Blinken’s imagination. Instead, it’s a sober and judicious assessment of how the State Department might incorporate human rights into diplomacy. And now it’s been tossed aside.
Blinken’s comments on Tuesday were no surprise. In the March issue of Commentary, I wrote about the left-wing nongovernmental organizations and Democratic politicians that have targeted the Commission on Unalienable Rights since its inception. It was nevertheless disappointing that the Left’s selective indignation ruined this opportunity to find bipartisan ground for human-rights policy.
Still, the commission’s report contains plenty of material a secretary of State might find useful. But first he’d have to read it.