U.S. Department of State Fiscal Year 2020 Agency Financial Report

The Work of the Commission on Unalienable Rights T he Commission was comprised of a variety of activists – lawyers, philosophers, humanities scholars, and non-governmental organization (NGO) leaders, who were ideologically, religiously, and politically diverse but of one mind when it came to the paramount importance of human rights in U.S. foreign policy. Public meetings began in October 2019 and proceeded once per month until February 2020. (A sixth meeting was planned but canceled on account of the COVID-19 pandemic.) The conversations – which included prepared remarks delivered by invited experts, followed by questions posed by individual commissioners – were wide-ranging. Topics included the nature of rights at America’s founding; the New Deal emergence of social and economic rights; the distinction between rights and freedom, as seen through the experience of African-American slaves; China’s Marxist, nationalist conception of human rights; the operations, priorities, and failures of American human rights NGOs; international treaties and international war crime tribunals; and more. Attendees were given a chance at the close of each meeting to ask questions of the Commission. At various times, the Commission heard the perspectives of members of the clergy; activists from both the right and left; congressional staff members; law professors; and representatives from foreign embassies. (Governments like Brazil’s had indicated an acute interest in the Commission’s work.) Members of think tanks and NGOs were also present. In addition, commissioners received briefings from State Department personnel. Over the course of the year, they met with the Office of Legal Adviser; the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor; the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom; the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration; the U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela; and the Secretary of State himself. Apart from these briefings, there were a series of administrative sessions, in which commissioners reflected on speakers’ testimony, assigned responsibilities for drafting various portions of the report Secretary Pompeo had tasked them to produce, and considered how to proceed. Over the course of six months, what eventually emerged was a sketch of the Commission’s final report, the core of which would consist of parallels drawn between two forms of secular rights “scripture,” the American Declaration of Independence, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In particular, commissioners, in crafting the report, were attentive to the ways in which the ideals of the former declaration were reflected and refracted in the latter, a document written close to 200 years after the thirteen colonies’ break with Britain, at a time when America’s role in the world was vastly different, and vastly more consequential. The purpose of the report – the intended audience for which was not only the Secretary of State, but also the State Department, the American public, and international readers of various stripes – was not to discover new principles as much as to restate and clarify confusion regarding older ones that had been lost to what Abraham Lincoln referred to “the silent artillery of time.” In other words, the report would be “a return to basics,” but supplemented with fresh and penetrating insights. Secretary Pompeo and Commission Chairman Mary Ann Glendon, professor emerita Harvard Law School and former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, participate in a session on “Unalienable Rights and the Securing of Freedom” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 16, 2020. Department of State 16 | U ni ted S tates D epartment of S tate 2020 A gency F inanci al R eport