The issue of human rights is less prominent in international affairs today than it once was. Political leaders, even in democratic countries, increasingly tend to downgrade it, if not neglect it altogether.
This presents an especially striking contrast with the last quarter of the 20th century, during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, when issues of human rights were often at the very center of events on the world stage. It was a time when names like Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky, Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, filled the headlines. Human rights were formally incorporated into U.S. foreign policy in this period, as the Carter administration established a new State Department Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs whose responsibilities included the annual submission to Congress of reports on the human rights performance of other countries around the world.
The most recent initiative in this sphere is the State Department’s plan, announced in July, to establish a new advisory body, the “Commission on Unalienable Rights.” So far, discussion of this plan has generated much more heat than light. The commission, according to an announcement in the Federal Register, is tasked with providing “fresh thinking” about where human rights discourse “has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.” Not surprisingly, it is opposed by many of the leaders of what is often referred to as the “human rights community.”
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