President Trump’s unconventional address to the United Nations General Assembly last week was short on specifics, but his administration’s recent actions have changed America’s human rights policy in ways that may profoundly disrupt the global organization’s human rights system. The system does need disruption, but where is America’s alternative path in support of the principle of human rights?
The State Department’s new report on human rights around the world shows a departure from norms that have previously informed the document. The report now says nothing about corruption in government and the freedom of assembly. As noted by Human Rights Watch, it thus gives a pass to authoritarian states whose power depends on corruption and repression. “The administration has … grossly mischaracterized the human rights records of abusive governments with which it has or is currently seeking friendly relations.”
The report elides information about violations of women’s and gay rights, framing its definition of human rights on what the Trump administration sees as “traditional values,” thus challenging the ideal of transcultural, universal human rights.
Shaping human rights data to align with national interests is considered “politicization.” But in fact, no government can detachedly evaluate the human rights records of other states, putting aside economic and political necessities; nonpartisan civil society analyses are more capable of objective human rights assessments than governments.
Indeed, autocratic states have always accused the U.S. of politicizing human rights. In response to the State Department report, China and other despotic states have created their own, bogus reports that denounce the human rights situation in the U.S. as racist, violent and ridden with economic inequalities.
The release of the report is always a major event for human rights groups around the world, which hope it will support their claims and portend future pressure on their regimes. The report has thus raised expectations that, when unmet, can create resentments. Despite its problems, it has affirmed America’s support for basic political freedoms, and a willingness to hold even friendly states to account.
The new report will not have that result.
In embracing the very human rights politics that afflict the U.N., dropping even the pretense of objectivity, it is a step in the direction of the laughable propaganda documents produced by dictatorships. The report indirectly affirms that the “international community,” as John Locke observed, is really no civil community at all, but a state of nature.
The Trump administration also announced its refusal to participate in the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review. As a spokesperson explained, engagement in this review “implies endorsement of the (Human Rights) Council’s mandate and activities and ignores its persistent failure to condemn the most egregious human rights violators,” although this is precisely what the State Department has also done in its new human rights report.
The Universal Periodic Review, as its title indicates, ensures that each U.N. member is subjected to an analysis of its human rights compliance. While a good idea in principle, the review, like the international human rights system generally, is egregiously abused by authoritarian states, which use it to legitimate themselves. China has ruthlessly gamed the system, turning its review into a PR exercise. where client states read out scripted messages praising the regime. Even North Korea has been widely praised during its periodic review.
And while the U.S. is among the few states to have truthfully confronted human rights abusers, politics has also invaded its performance: Under the Obama administration, for example, the State Department bent over backward to suggest that the government upholds economic and social human rights, leading legal philosopher Roger Pilon to write that the government’s self-evaluation “reads like a politically correct campaign brochure” that “implicitly sanctioned the conflation of real and supposed rights.”
There are thus reasons why refusal to participate in the UPR can be defended on principle, and other states may well follow America’s lead. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have put another nail in the coffin of liberal internationalism, which has, with regard to human rights, generally devolved into a series of hypocritical, bureaucratic rituals. But with no indication of a positive program to defend liberty, they have also left freedom-seeking communities with no North Star in a world where despotism is on the march.
Aaron Rhodes is the author of “Human Rights Without Illusions: Escaping the Moral Trap of Universalism.” Previously, he served as executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and as president of the Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe.
