34 United States The EconomistAugust 10th 2019
M
ary ann glendonis not used to having her bona fides ques-
tioned. The 80-year-old Harvard professor is an eminent le-
gal scholar whose books on comparative law and human rights are
widely respected. A former ambassador to the Holy See, she is also
a conservative Catholic, whose opposition to gay marriage and
abortion have drawn flak. But her view of abortion is nuanced; she
is not for a blanket ban. And her contribution to human rights is
significant. She was active in the civil-rights struggle (and had a
child with an African-American) in the 1960s; her book on the con-
servative and Christian roots of the rights movement is seminal.
Yet since her former student Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state,
announced that she will lead a new “Commission on Unalienable
Rights”, both she and it have been savaged. Over 400 rights, reli-
gious and academic bodies, as well as Obama and Bush adminis-
tration officials such as David Kramer and Susan Rice, signed a let-
ter asking the panel to be scrapped before it has even met.
In a lengthy email exchange, Ms Glendon sounded understand-
ably bruised: “I really hope that those who have rushed to judg-
ment about the commission before it gets off the ground will one
day understand how far off the mark they were.” Yet that does seem
unlikely. The opposition stems from a belief that Mr Pompeo
launched the commission to promote religious liberty—with
which evangelical Christians, the Trump administration’s most
important constituency, are obsessed—at the expense of repro-
ductive and gay rights, which they abhor.
This is a fair deduction. Religious liberty is the only right in
which Mr Pompeo, who is evangelical and highly ambitious, has
shown any serious interest. He has also previously linked it to the
archaic phrase “unalienable right”, which conservatives use to de-
note the rights to liberty and property enshrined in America’s
founding documents. By contrast, many people, seemingly in-
cluding Mr Pompeo, view more recent protections for gays and
other minorities as mere “interests” or “goods”, doled out by liber-
als for political gain.
Ms Glendon is also among them: she once called gay marriage a
demand for “special preference”. So are at least some of her fellow
commissioners. They are a mainly conservative group of academ-
ics and faith leaders, few of whom have any expertise in humanrights. And as if those were not sufficient grounds for scepticism,
the commission is viewed with suspicion by the State Depart-
ment’s own human-rights division, which has had no hand in it.
Still, Ms Glendon insists that the pre-emptive criticism is wrong:
“Nowhere in our charge is there anything about reprioritising
[rights].” And someone of her stature deserves a serious hearing.
In her view there are many reasons to reappraise the rights
agenda. It is widely recognised in the human-rights community
that the great post-1945 human-rights project is in “crisis,” she
says. To underline that, she quotes a list of liberals, including Salil
Shetty, a former boss of Amnesty International, and Samuel Moyn
of Yale University, who have expressed similar concerns. One is
that governments are not defending rights. The erosion of the frag-
ile consensus that once supported the un Declaration on Human
Rights has benefited and been exploited by the world’s worst rights
violators, writes Ms Glendon. Like Mr Moyn, she has argued for re-
cognising socioeconomic rights, as European countries do but
America does not, as well as civil and political ones.
Her emails also touched on her more controversial views. Pan-
dering to “special interests” has led rights groups to disavow “es-
tablished rights that do not suit their agendas”, she wrote. Applied
to gay rights, that is an illiberal view. Yet Ms Glendon can at least
cite more history in support of it than her critics allow. With their
conservative, Christian roots, the framers of theunDeclaration
did not envisage gay marriage. Conservatives like her therefore be-
lieve they are not reactionaries, as liberals claim, but rather keep-
ers of the rights movement’s true flame.
“Crisis” may be too strong a word, but Ms Glendon is right to
note the strain human rights are under, including from authoritar-
ian leaders, ineffective international institutions and rights pro-
liferation. An administration that wanted to lead a good-faith re-
view of such worries could have drawn support from across the
political spectrum. Ms Glendon’s illiberal views should not dis-
qualify her from leading such an effort. Gay rights are a settled is-
sue in America, and Mr Pompeo would struggle to restrict State De-
partment support for them by more than the minimal steps he has
already taken—by denying some embassies permission to fly flags
to celebrate Gay Pride, for example. The problem is that there is not
much reason to think the new commission is a good-faith effort.Unalienable, except when they’re not
Even beyond Mr Pompeo’s evangelical crowd-pleasing, the Trump
administration has shown little interest in standing up to the
worst rights-violators. Mr Pompeo only ever castigates abusers,
such as Iran or Cuba, when it is politically convenient. Mr Trump
appears to have no interest in the issue. And the administration’s
attacks on international rights institutions look equally self-serv-
ing. Its argument for pulling out of the unHuman Rights Commis-
sion—a troubled body that had nevertheless been improving un-
der American influence—was bogus.
The administration has a record of convening expert panels to
score political points. One was given the impossible task of sub-
stantiating Mr Trump’s claim that his election saw massive vote-
rigging. Another has been proposed—under one of the few cli-
mate-change deniers in an Ivy League science faculty—on global
warming. That Ms Glendon’s panel looks like the latest example is,
in a sense, nothing unusual. Despite the lofty ideals that attend
them, rights claims are always made and resisted as part of broader
political battles. Mr Moyn calls them “politics by other means”. Yet
what is depressing in this case is how small the politics seem. 7Lexington Rowing about rights
There is a need for fresh thinking on human rights. Mike Pompeo’s effort looks like a partisan stunt