On July 16, the U.S. State Department
released the 60-page
Draft Report of the Commission on Inalienable Rights. The Report was released in Philadelphia by Commission Chair Mary Ann Glendon and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. (
Full text and video of their remarks.) The wide-ranging report emphasizes the religious traditions of the country's founders as well as the primacy of religious liberty. Here are a few excerpts:
Foremost among the unalienable rights that government is established to secure, from the founders’ point of view, are property rights and religious liberty. A political society that destroys the possibility of either loses its legitimacy....
Some mistakenly suppose that so generous a conception of liberty must rest on skepticism about salvation and justice. Why give people freedom to choose if God’s will and the imperatives of justice are knowable? In fact, a certain skepticism is involved, but it is directed not at faith and justice but at the capacity of government officials to rule authoritatively on the deepest and greatest questions. The Madisonian view of religious liberty ... proceeds from a theistic premise about the sources of human dignity even as it denies the state the power to dictate final answers about ultimate matters....
[E]ven a quick, preliminary reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reveals many parallels to the fundamental constitutional and political principles of the United States....
The Universal Declaration’s weaving of civil and political rights together with economic, social, and cultural rights into an integrated whole poses a certain challenge for the United States. Unlike the Universal Declaration and unlike the majority of constitutions of the world that have been adopted since the early- to mid- 20th century, the U.S. Constitution does not generally recognize, let alone entrench, economic and social rights. Throughout the Cold War, the United States emphasized its commitment to civil and political rights almost exclusively, while rejecting the notion, championed by the Soviet Union, of the preeminence of economic and social rights. Since the end of the Cold War, a consistent aspect of U.S. human rights policy, across every presidential administration regardless of political party, has been U.S. reluctance to recognize economic and social rights as an integral part of the canon of international human rights....
The Draft Report is open for public comment until July 30.
Reaction to the Draft Report by some has been very negative.
