OPINION:
Whichever candidate Americans elect president on November 5 has a unique opportunity to reignite the global human rights movement, a drive that has stalled and been in decline for 20 years.
The key is calling the Free World back to the basics. We must resist diluting what we consider to be human rights by returning to the fundamental rights agreed to by the global community in the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Getting back to the basic agreement will let us relaunch this most fundamental of human needs – the right of every individual to live free and in dignity.
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China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia have made a mockery of human rights because the rest of the world can’t agree on a standard to hold them to.
But we do have an already agreed upon standard – the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, signed by all 193 member states of the United Nations.
At the heart of the Declaration is Article 18: the right to freedom of religion, thought, and conscience. This fundamental right has a global constituency organizing for its protection. At the same time, the right to religious freedom is being attacked by dictators and mobs like never before.
The robust protection of this right will help protect all other rights. A healthy heart supports the whole body yet a weak heart leads to many maladies. Get religious freedom right and the human rights movement gets stronger.
The next president should host a White House summit on the 1948 UN Declaration and invite countries who respect human rights to sign the agreement again and pledge their continued support for its global enactment.
Furthermore, a global review panel should be constituted to point out egregious infractions by countries. This nonjudicial body would have a sense of moral clarity that the UN and International Criminal Court sorely lack.
This is not an opportunity for dictatorships that trample on the rights of their citizens to whitewash their crimes. Terrorist regimes like Iran should never be given leadership roles at the United Nations or other global bodies.
In fact, no country should be allowed on the UN Human Rights Council that is a gross violator of the 1948 declaration. It was an embarrassment for the UN in 2023 when Iran chaired the annual meeting of the Human Rights Council Social Forum in Geneva. It was insulting to the victims of government oppression in Iran and elsewhere in the world.
China envisions itself as a world leader but can’t even discuss human rights because of the threat it poses to its dictatorship. Here is a field they won’t even enter, and if they do, we should start discussing the genocides they are committing against the Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, and Falun Gong. Such countries do not belong in leadership positions.
The President of the United States can bring world leaders together. By calling such a summit it will put the global spotlight on our deteriorating global human rights situation and create momentum for something to be done. Something must be done.
The biggest human rights events ever held at the State Department were the Ministerials to Advance Religious Freedom when I served as Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom. We invited more than 100 countries to the second Ministerial who either demonstrated a commitment to advancing religious freedom and promoting Article 18, or that had recently taken meaningful steps to begin to doing so.
A White House event would be even bigger. It would reinvigorate the human rights movement and propel it forward. It is in America’s best interests to support freedom and the rule of law where they do not exist.
Authoritarian regimes get away with their fundamental abuses because of the lack of an agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a human night. We can put an already agreed-upon standard back in its rightful place and then start measuring people by it. As the old adage says, “You rarely can change something if you can’t measure it.”
This applies to human rights as well.
President Trump or Vice President Harris, whoever wins on November 5, here is a tangible act that would improve the daily lives of billions of people around the world and reverse the advance of dictators. Seize this moment!
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Sam Brownback is a former U.S. senator and governor of Kansas. He served as the United States Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom from 2018 to 2021 and chairs the National Council for Religious Freedom. He is also a Senior Fellow at Global Christian Relief.
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