On August 26, 2020, the final report of the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights was released. As Secretary of State Pompeo had put it more than a year before on the occasion of the commission’s establishment, “[t]he commission’s mission isn’t to discover new principles but to ground our discussion of human rights in America’s founding principles.”

This was necessary, according to Pompeo, because since the end of the Cold War, human rights activists had shifted their attention to “new categories of rights.” While this was often done with noble intentions, he warned, “[n]ot everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right. Loose talk of ‘rights’ unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy.”

The commission comprised 12 academics, philosophers, and activists and was chaired by Harvard professor and former ambassador Mary Ann Glendon. Its report found that the idea of human dignity at the heart of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is fully compatible with the American tradition of “inalienable rights.”

Indeed, the opening sentence of the preamble to the Universal Declaration even mentions both concepts in the same breath: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, (…).”

Nor does the commission leave any doubt that it shares Pompeo’s expressed concern about new rights: “The effort to shut down legitimate debate by recasting contestable policy preferences as fixed and unquestionable human rights imperatives promotes intolerance, impedes reconciliation, devalues core rights, and denies rights in the name of rights.”

In retrospect, it is understandable that the institution of the Commission, with Pompeo’s explanation of it, struck a nerve. After all, both touch on what is perhaps at the heart of the current human rights controversy, namely, the relationship between old and new rights.

Nor is it surprising that the Commission’s report, precisely because of its explicit link to the Founding principles, has received a decidedly mixed reception domestically. The sharpness of the tone of some reactions can still raise eyebrows three years later. For example, Pompeo’s successor, Secretary Blinken, “repudiated” the report “decisively.”

Blinken’s reasoning revolved around a hierarchy of rights that the Commission would like to introduce: “One of the core principles of human rights is that they are universal. All people are entitled to these rights, no matter where they’re born, what they believe, whom they love, or any other characteristic. Human rights are also co-equal; there is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others.”

Now, the Commission recognizes the premise of a missing hierarchy of human rights in principle for the rights contained in the Universal Declaration, although it is realistic enough to admit that in practice, a country like the United States will have to prioritize even among those rights in its foreign policy.

With respect to new rights, however, a prior question still applies: whether they should be recognized as rights. The Commission gives several worthwhile, non-exhaustive considerations for this purpose. It does so because the concept of human dignity is inadequate, as it is itself an essentially contested concept.

A good illustration of this offers the changed conception of human dignity, which has now become leading in European human rights bodies. According to Grégor Puppinck, Ph.D., director of the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), this concerns a conception of dignity “which tends to be reduced to the sole individual will or spirit, as opposed to the body, and which considers the rejection of nature as an emancipation and a progress.” Consequently, according to Puppinck, in Europe, there is “the evolution from the ‘human rights’ of 1948 to the ‘individual rights’ of the last twenty years, and finally to the ‘trans-human rights’ which are being developed today.”

It is no exaggeration to say that a similar conception of human dignity also prevails within other international organizations, such as the United Nations and numerous non-governmental organizations working to promote human rights.

Nor is it far-fetched to seek in this a significant explanation for the crisis of legitimacy in which the entire human rights project finds itself 75 years after the creation of the Universal Declaration. As the report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights puts it, “human rights are now misunderstood by many, manipulated by some, rejected by the world’s worst violators, and subject to ominous new threats.” This perceived crisis prompted Secretary Pompeo to establish the Commission. We might follow Walter Russell Mead, who characterized the Commission’s solution as “incendiary centrism.”

After all, on the one hand, the commission’s report keeps open the possibility of an inevitable expansion of the set of rights from the Universal Declaration, which was deliberately kept limited at the time. On the other hand, in recognizing new rights, “the essentials of freedom, equality, and human dignity” must be preserved.

The “incendiary” character of this middle course lies not only in the fact that the Commission, contrary to the currently prevailing view, re-emphasizes the importance of ‘natural rights’ such as those to property and religious freedom: “A political society that destroys the possibility of either loses its legitimacy.”

The Commission also disputes, equally against the view prevalent among human rights activists, that there would be a conflict between human rights on the one hand and the importance traditionally attached to sovereignty within the American constitutional tradition: “National sovereignty serves as a crucial condition for securing human rights because it is typically at the level of the national political community that human rights can be protected best.”

There is also a connection here with new rights since attempts are regularly made to implement them with the help of courts or soft law. This threatens to erode the democratic process and thus reduce popular support for human rights.

This “incendiary” character of the report, however, remarkably enough, applies mainly domestically. Internationally, the Commission received support from the world’s most prominent independent Islamic organization, the Indonesian Nahdlatul Ulama [NU]. The head of this organization indicated in a December 2020 letter to Pompeo that “we have unreservedly embraced the Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights and urged our allies at Centrist Democrat International to do likewise.”

This Centrist Democrat International (CDI) is a formerly Christian Democratic alliance of predominantly European and Latin American political parties. Two months before NU’s letter, CDI’s Executive Board had already unanimously passed a resolution, “[a]cknowledging the U.S. Department of State’s Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights and its re-affirmation of the spirit and substance of fundamental human rights, including those articulated by UDHR.”

Meanwhile, NU wishes to promote and export a more inclusive, tolerant Islam. Within the G20, it works with the Saudi Arabia-based Muslim World League, among others, to this end.

Co-founder and director of the permanent secretariat of the G20’s Religion Forum, Timothy Samuel Shah, further indicated that, in addition to Western humanism, “the ‘Ashokan’ rights tradition of India, which traces its origins to the 3rd century BCE emperor of India, Ashoka,” for example, should also be compatible with the idea of an international rule of law based on global ethics and humanitarian values.

Thus, the fundamental discussions surrounding the creation of the Universal Declaration, which Commission President Glendon wrote about so engagingly in her book A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2001), seem to have been revived 75 years later.

That also means that, for those who, despite everything, remain committed to the cause of human rights as such, there is not only cause for concern on this anniversary but also reason for at least some hope. After all, thanks to its centrist and incendiary character, the Commission on Unalienable Rights report has sparked a modest resourcing of human rights outside official channels.