Natural Rights vs. Human Rights: The State Department ’s New Commission on Unalienable Rights

Yesterday afternoon we learned fromPolitico that the State Department had just “quietly published” in the Federal Registera notice that the department intends to establish a Commission on Unalienable Rights. Its aim, as the notice states, is toprovide the Secretary of State advice and recommendations concerning international human rights matters. The Commission will provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation ’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.ThePolitico report goes on to cite human rights activists and former State Department officials worrying “that talk of the ‘nation’s founding principles’ and ‘natural law’ are coded signals of plans to focus less on protecting women and LGBT people.” And critics note also, correctly, that “the Trump administration’s record on human rights so far is spotty at best.”Still, properly undertaken, this commission could help correct confusions at the core of modern human rights thinking and policy, many of which were highlighted in a new book we featured ata Cato forum a year ago, Aaron Rhodes ’The Debasement of Human Rights: How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Rhodes and I summarized those issues with a piece atNational Review.In a nutshell, the modern human rights movement took shape in the aftermath of World War II, with the creation of the United Nations and the drafting of the U.N. ’s 1948 Universal...

Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 31, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Roger Pilon Source Type: blogs