Skip to main content
Menu

Main navigation

  • About
    • Annual Reports
    • Leadership
    • Jobs
    • Student Programs
    • Media Information
    • Store
    • Contact
    LOADING...
  • Experts
    • Policy Scholars
    • Adjunct Scholars
    • Fellows
  • Events
    • Upcoming
    • Past
    • Event FAQs
    • Sphere Summit
    LOADING...
  • Publications
    • Studies
    • Commentary
    • Books
    • Reviews and Journals
    • Public Filings
    LOADING...
  • Blog
  • Donate
    • Sponsorship Benefits
    • Ways to Give
    • Planned Giving

Issues

  • Constitution and Law
    • Constitutional Law
    • Criminal Justice
    • Free Speech and Civil Liberties
  • Economics
    • Banking and Finance
    • Monetary Policy
    • Regulation
    • Tax and Budget Policy
  • Politics and Society
    • Education
    • Government and Politics
    • Health Care
    • Poverty and Social Welfare
    • Technology and Privacy
  • International
    • Defense and Foreign Policy
    • Global Freedom
    • Immigration
    • Trade Policy
Live Now

Cato at Liberty


  • Blog Home
  • RSS

Email Signup

Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!

Topics
  • Banking and Finance
  • Constitutional Law
  • Criminal Justice
  • Defense and Foreign Policy
  • Education
  • Free Speech and Civil Liberties
  • Global Freedom
  • Government and Politics
  • Health Care
  • Immigration
  • Monetary Policy
  • Poverty and Social Welfare
  • Regulation
  • Tax and Budget Policy
  • Technology and Privacy
  • Trade Policy
Archives
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • Show More
May 31, 2019 1:15PM

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

By Roger Pilon

SHARE

Yesterday afternoon we learned from Politico that the State Department had just “quietly published” in the Federal Register a notice that the department intends to establish a Commission on Unalienable Rights. Its aim, as the notice states, is to

provide 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.

The Politico 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 at a 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 at National 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 Declaration of Human Rights. As we wrote in the National Review piece:

Arising from political compromises between post‐​war progressives and some of the world’s worst tyrannies, the UDHR bows simply to “inherent dignity,” making no mention of natural law or natural rights. To be sure, it lists rights in that tradition. But it goes on with a list of so‐​called economic and social rights — to jobs, housing, “periodic holidays with pay” — which today dominate human‐​rights debate and practice.


Unlike natural rights to freedom, which require only that we be left alone, these economic and social rights, if rights at all, are not universalizable. They’re created by legislatures, requiring endless redistributive schemes. And as demand for them grows, governments grow and liberty yields. More sinister still, the original compromises that elevated these rights to the status of human rights have enabled totalitarian regimes to sit at the human‐​rights table. After 70 years, a toxic hypocrisy poisons the debate. Russia, China, Cuba, Islamic theocracies, even North Korea boast about their often illusory economic and social programs as evidence of human‐​rights compliance and their own legitimacy.

We have here, in short, a textbook example of how confused thinking, coming out of the Progressive Era, has led to confused policy, and worse. In fact, the Politico article notes that Kiron Skinner, Secretary of State Pompeo’s director of policy planning and the commission contact listed in the Federal Register notice, “drew criticism recently for seeming to suggest that China, a rising power, is such a fundamentally different culture from the United States that arguments about human rights may not have much effect in dialogue with Beijing.”


But there is truth in that suggestion. As I showed in a chapter on China’s Constitution in Cato’s 1998 book, China in the New Millennium, unlike in the natural rights tradition, which begins with the individual, the socialist tradition—and, in fact, progressivism too—begins with the group, its agenda carried out, in countries like China, through the Communist Party. On that understanding, “human rights” are not innate and unalienable but rather are a function of that starting point. Thus, as I wrote in that chapter, “a careful reading of [the Chinese Constitution] will show that the ‘law’ provides virtually no protection for individual rights, notwithstanding its use of the language of rights.” Indeed,

Article 51 sets out a general defeasance clause: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China, in exercising their freedoms and rights, may not infringe upon the interests of the state, of society, or of the collective.” Given that those “interests” are boundless in principle, and vague besides, any claims that individuals might have against the state can always be trumped as a matter of constitutional law. It should hardly surprise that the Constitution elevates the interests of the state above the rights of the citizen. After all, the whole point of the Constitution is to order affairs—including the affairs of individual citizens—toward the goal of building socialism. Given that all‐​encompassing end, it stands to reason that individuals should not be permitted to act in ways that might compromise the end. In fact, when they do, their acts are branded as “counterrevolutionary” and subject to suppression (Article 28).

If this new commission can refocus America’s human rights thinking and policy on America’s first principles, grounded in our unalienable natural rights, the implications are far reaching, not only for the rest of the world but for America itself.

Related Tags
Constitutional Law, Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies

Stay Connected to Cato

Sign up for the newsletter to receive periodic updates on Cato research, events, and publications.

View All Newsletters

1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20001-5403
202-842-0200
Contact Us
Privacy

Footer 1

  • About
    • Annual Reports
    • Leadership
    • Jobs
    • Student Programs
    • Media Information
    • Store
    • Contact
  • Podcasts

Footer 2

  • Experts
    • Policy Scholars
    • Adjunct Scholars
    • Fellows
  • Events
    • Upcoming
    • Past
    • Event FAQs
    • Sphere Summit

Footer 3

  • Publications
    • Books
    • Cato Journal
    • Regulation
    • Cato Policy Report
    • Cato Supreme Court Review
    • Cato’s Letter
    • Human Freedom Index
    • Economic Freedom of the World
    • Cato Handbook for Policymakers

Footer 4

  • Blog
  • Donate
    • Sponsorship Benefits
    • Ways to Give
    • Planned Giving
Also from Cato Institute:
Libertarianism.org
|
Humanprogress.org
|
Downsizinggovernment.org