In July 2018, the State Department hosted its first annual Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. At a Heritage Foundation panel discussion, the Christian conservative attorney Benjamin Bull claimed that the left-wing was using “newly manufactured human rights" to "crush” the “traditional” and “natural" rights recognized by Christians.
Creation of the commission
On May 30, 2019, the State Department announced its intention to create the commission. The announcement was published in the Federal Register and stated that the commission's purpose was to "provide the Secretary of State advice and recommendations concerning international human rights matters" along with "fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation's founding principles of natural law and natural rights." On June 28, 2019, it was reported that Robbie George, co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, was involved with the planning of the commission. On July 7, 2019, Pompeo published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal explaining the commission's intended focus. He said that "universal," "unalienable" rights must be distinguished from "ad hoc rights granted by governments." Modern references to "new categories of rights" aim at "rewarding interest groups and dividing humanity into subgroups." He warned that "loose talk of 'rights' unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy." He said the commission expects to generate debate over philosophical questions such as: "What are our fundamental freedoms? Why do we have them? Who or what grants these rights? How do we know if a claim of human rights is true? What happens when rights conflict? Should certain categories of rights be inextricably 'linked' to other rights?" The commission's intent is to advise, not to create policy. The commission's creation was announced on July 8, 2019. The following day, State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus gave a press briefing in which she explained that "authoritarian regimes subverting this human rights context" and claimed that the U.N. Human Rights Commission had become "a laughingstock." She added that the new commission would not be "partisan" and did not intend to "create new policy on human rights." She also mentioned that Sam Brownback, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, had recently produced an International Religious Freedom Report.
Members
As initially announced on July 8, 2019, the commission had 12 members, including eight men and four women. The chairperson is Mary Ann Glendon, a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican who now teaches at Harvard Law School. The rapporteur is F. Cartwright Weiland, who works at the State Department. Kiron Skinner was named as the head of the executive secretary, but she lost her State Department job several weeks later. The other members are:
, an LGBTQ rights organization, found that seven members of the commission had made anti-LGBTQ remarks in the past. Joanne Lin, national director of advocacy and government affairs at the human rights organizationAmnesty International USA, says that this commission "appears to be an attempt to further hateful policies aimed at women and LGBTQ people." Roger Pilon, chair of Constitutional Studies for the Cato Institute, suggested that the reference to "natural law" may indicate a connection with the administration's efforts to uphold so-called "religious liberty". On June 12, 2019, Senators Bob Menendez, Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin, Jeanne Shaheen, and Chris Coons wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to "express our deep concern with the process and intent behind the Department of State’s recently announced Commission on Unalienable Rights...With deep reservations about the Commission, we request that you not take any further action regarding its membership or proposed operations without first consulting with congressional oversight and appropriations committees." On June 13, 2019, the U.S. House debated an en bloc amendment which included a provision to defund the Commission. On June 18, 2019, the U.S. House voted 231–187 in favor of the en bloc amendment.
