(Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part series examining the work of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, formed in July 2019 by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Part 1 examined its activities to date and reviewed key problematic views and assertions expressed by panel members and some of the witnesses it selected to testify.)

The Commission on Unalienable Rights set up by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to advise him on “the role of human rights in American foreign policy” has canceled its final public hearing due to the coronavirus pandemic and is now drafting its final report. While the public still has an opportunity to submit views to the body, the evidence to date suggests the commission will produce a report for Pompeo that will parrot his conservative agenda. Just last week, Pompeo gave a speech to conservative pastors in which he assured his audience that the commission would help advance their shared agenda.

The commission was heavily critiqued when it was set up in 2019, because it had such a clear anti-rights agenda and many of its appointed members had long expressed anti-rights views on women’s, LGBTI, and socio-economic issues. In our previous post, we detailed the public hearings held by the commission in 2019 and early this year, and the troubling themes that have emerged. Drawing on monitoring of every hearing by the Duke International Human Rights Clinic, we explained some of the key problematic views expressed in those hearings. They include a general skepticism toward international human rights, that there are too many rights, that rights protections should be rolled back, that there is a hierarchy among rights, and that religious freedom is one of the most important rights, if not the most important.

Here we discuss further why these themes emerging in the commission’s work are so wrong and so harmful from a human rights perspective. Read more via Just Security