Blinken junks Trump-era stance on rights

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday formally scrapped a blueprint championed by his predecessor to limit U.S. promotion of human rights abroad to causes favored by conservatives such as religious freedom and property matters while dismissing reproductive and LGBT rights.

Blinken said a report prepared for former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that sought to pare down the number of freedoms prioritized in U.S. foreign policy was “unbalanced,” did not reflect Biden administration policies and would not guide them. The report from Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights had been harshly criticized by human-rights groups.

“One of the core principles of human rights is that they are universal. All people are entitled to these rights, no matter where they’re born, what they believe, whom they love, or any other characteristic,” Blinken said. “Human rights are also co-equal; there is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others.”

“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 said. “At my confirmation hearing, I promised that the Biden-Harris Administration would repudiate those unbalanced views. We do so decisively today.”

Blinken also reversed a Trump administration decision to remove sections on reproductive rights from the State Department’s annual human-rights reports on foreign countries. “Women’s rights — including sexual and reproductive rights — are human rights,” he said.

Blinken made the announcement repudiating the commission’s report as he rolled out the annual human rights reports. The reports, covering last year, highlighted a declining trend in human rights around the world and the impact that the coronavirus pandemic had on rights practices. It noted that some governments had “used the crisis as a pretext to restrict rights and consolidate authoritarian rule.”

Human-rights advocates condemned the report from Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights when he unveiled it last year to great fanfare from religious and social conservatives. The report was part of a broader Trump administration effort to restore the primacy of what officials considered the values of America’s Founding Fathers.

Pompeo had promoted the report at events from Pennsylvania to Indonesia and in numerous interviews with conservative media in the hope it would serve as a guide for future administrations.

Nearly all references to the commission’s report and Pompeo’s advocacy of it have been removed from the State Department’s website, although they remain available on archived pages.

President Joe Biden’s administration has already repealed several Trump-era human-rights decisions. Those have included reengaging with the U.N. Human Rights Council, abandoning the socalled Geneva Consensus and Mexico City rule that oppose abortion rights and restoring LGBT protections as a matter of administration policy.

Pompeo and many conservatives have long decried the expansion of the definition of “human rights” to include matters they believe are not God-given or made specifically sacrosanct in the U.S. Constitution.

The “international human rights project is in crisis,” Pompeo said when he unveiled the commission’s report at an event in Philadelphia. He lamented that “too many human-rights advocacy groups have traded proud principles for partisan politics” and that “even many well-intentioned people assert new and novel rights that often conflict.”

Human-rights groups lashed out at the findings of the commission, which was chaired by a mentor of Pompeo’s, conservative scholar and former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Mary Ann Glendon, who has questioned the legitimacy of rights including same-sex marriage.