“Human rights? Whatever.”
What happens when those in power seek to redefine “rights” in order to justify its own craven lawlessness?
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Those are three specific unalienable rights Thomas Jefferson wrote into our sacrosanct Declaration of Independence.
They seem so simple: Life. Liberty. Pursuit of happiness.
Yet they have remained the subject of perpetual debate, legislation, and policy the past 239 years, as it is the work of a functional democratic government to provide and protect conditions that preserve our rights; and it is up to us to hold our government accountable in its duty to uphold them.
Human rights are those fundamental to common decency. They safeguard people’s individual freedom to write their own destiny without fear of them being arbitrarily revoked.
But what happens when the line between human rights and privileges is blurred? What happens when those in power seek to redefine “rights” in order to justify its own craven lawlessness?
Earlier this month, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the convicted felon illegitimately occupying the Oval Office is exploring “legal” pathways to abduct and disappear U.S. citizens to foreign concentration camps, like Cecot prison in El Salvador where Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being unlawfully detained, and like Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, and Mohsen Mahdawi.
Of course, no one would argue convicted criminals shouldn’t be brought to justice, but what about those who haven’t committed crimes, like Garcia?There are those insisting this cannot happen, that it’s unconstitutional. And they’re correct. But only in a system where fundamental human rights are respected. Only in a place where “crimes” are adjudicated in courts, not within government agencies seeking to invent arbitrary violations of law.
Yet that is exactly what the US State Department is planning.
In this present regime’s objective to eliminate those deemed a challenge to its fascist vision for America, the State Department is removing critiques of government abuses like harsh prison conditions, corruption, and restrictions on political activity from its annual reports on international human rights.
As NPR reported last week:
Despite decades of precedent, the reports, which are meant to inform congressional decisions on foreign aid allocations and security assistance, will no longer call governments out for such things as denying freedom of movement and peaceful assembly. They won’t condemn retaining political prisoners without due process or restrictions on “free and fair elections.”
If we no longer call out other countries (like El Salvador) for their human rights abuses, we can’t be accused of hypocrisy when we abuse our own citizens’ rights. Then we will have officially become “that country”, the one from which we have spent generations distancing our self.
Specific to El Salvador, the section on prison conditions is erased. NPR reported:
The only remnants of those violations are reports on prison deaths that fall into the category of “extrajudicial killings” and a mention of abuse by prison guards in a legislatively mandated section on “Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.”
As reported in Politico, also being struck from the report are references to violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); involuntary or coercive medical and psychological practices; arbitrary or unlawful privacy interference; internet freedom restrictions; gender-based violence; and violence and threats of it against people with disabilities.
Remember the outrage twenty years ago when pictures surfaced of American soldiers posing before tortured Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison? Images of human beings placed in humiliating positions, threatened with electrocution and assault, sent shock waves through the international community not only because it was happening, but because it was the United States, the supposed exemplar for everyone else, perpetrating it. Our pledge of “liberty and justice for all” lost a lot of credibility.
Concerning the State Dept.’s recent decision, Amnesty International, USA executive director Paul O’Brien explained:
What this is, is a signal that the United States is no longer going to [pressure] other countries to uphold those rights that guarantee civic and political freedoms — the ability to speak, to express yourself, to gather, to protest, to organize.
Countries notorious for human rights abuses are now unfettered since the US is no better than they.
András Léderer of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee warned, “You’re removing pressure, and it definitely sends the message to the perpetrators that this is not important for [the U.S.] anymore.”
Christopher Le Mon, former deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, added:
You also can’t overstate the damage it will do to that credibility if the Trump administration’s edits are seen to diminish — not just the scope of what are defined as human rights, but also if those edits are seen to play favorites.
Not only have we lost economic credibility since the former host of Celebrity Apprentice started his stupid and unnecessary tariff war; not only have we lost diplomatic credibility among the world’s liberal democracies in our abandonment of Ukraine.
We are abdicating one of the most upstanding and unique qualities of what made the United States what it was. Everyone knows we haven’t been perfect (think slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the prison industrial complex). But we have always tried to improve, and we were making substantial improvements.
Until now.
It’s going to take a generation or more to get back what we are losing — if we ever do.