The New Yorker:

Much of the time, the Trump Administration looks like a flailing force, a machine of deregulation, defunding, and destruction. Once in a while, though, it actually creates something intentionally and efficiently. The packing of the federal judiciary is one such pocket of sustained action. Another appears to be the State Department’s reframing of the concept of human rights.

On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the composition of a new body called the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He promised that the commission would undertake “a review of the role of human rights in American foreign policy.” In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Pompeo proposed a revision of the concept of human rights, to distinguish between original unalienable rights and “ad hoc rights” that have been added since the end of the Cold War. The argument that some widely recognized human rights are more universal than others is one that countries ranging from Russia to the Gulf States to the Vatican have been advancing for years. The United States has recently been on the other side of this debate, advancing articulations of women’s rights, reproductive rights, and L.G.B.T. rights as human rights. Now the U.S. appears poised to put its three-hundred-pound thumb on the scale in favor of narrowly redefining the concept of human rights.

Pompeo’s statement, which he appeared to read with some difficulty, framed the mission of the new body in the language in which political theorists think and speak about human rights. “What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right?” he asked. “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?” The answers that the commission may propose appear preordained by its makeup.

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