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Pompeo Taps Conservative for Fresh Look on Human Rights

AFP

   WASHINGTON - Charging that human rights advocates have deviated from
   their original purpose, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday named
   a staunch abortion opponent to lead a new panel to set the U.S.
   direction.

   Pompeo, an evangelical Christian who often speaks of his faith,
   announced the creation of a State Department commission on "unalienable
   rights" to look at how the United States advocates human rights.

   Quoting Czech anti-communist icon Vaclav Havel as saying that "words
   like rights can be used for good or evil," Pompeo said that the panel
   will "revisit the most basic of questions - what does it mean to say,
   or claim, that something is in fact a human right?"

   "It's a sad commentary on our times that more than 70 years after the
   Universal Declaration of Human Rights, gross violations continue
   throughout the world, sometimes even in the name of human rights,"
   Pompeo said without elaborating.

   "International institutions, designed and built to protect human
   rights, have drifted from their original mission as human rights claims
   have proliferated," he said.

   Pompeo named as head of the commission Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard Law
   professor under whom he studied and who is one of the intellectual
   leaders of the anti-abortion movement.

   President Donald Trump's administration has downplayed human rights,
   using it as a cudgel against adversaries such as China, Iran and Cuba
   but treading lightly with U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

   Some U.S. conservatives take issue with mainstream human rights groups,
   faulting their advocacy of issues such as women's reproductive health,
   gay rights and income equality.

   Conservative thinkers instead speak of God-given rights and "natural
   law," a philosophy led by thinkers such as the late Germain Grisez who
   argued that contraceptives went against the "procreative good."

   Glendon represented the Vatican at the 1995 U.N. conference on women in
   Beijing - where then U.S. first lady Hillary Clinton, later secretary
   of state, gave a landmark speech in which she declared "women's rights
   are human rights."

   Glendon criticized the conference's push on sexual and reproductive
   health, warning of a "quick-fix approach to getting rid of poverty by
   getting rid of poor people."

   "Much of the foundation money that swirled around the Beijing process
   was aimed at forging a link between development aid and programs that
   pressure poor women into abortion, sterilization and use of risky
   contraceptive methods," she later wrote in the conservative religious
   journal First Things.

   Pompeo's panel is not without diverse voices. It includes Katrina
   Lantos Swett, a Democrat who has worked to preserve the legacy of her
   father, late congressman Tom Lantos, an outspoken critic of oppressive
   regimes.