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The Trump revolution in U.S. foreign policy has upended the global human rights regime. Within its first two weeks in office, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Human Rights Council and imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court. Its subsequent foreign assistance cuts fell heavily on U.S. funded democracy, human rights, and governance programs. Many diplomats covering these issues have since been dismissed, and the annual U.S. human rights reports have been both truncated and reframed to shield allies and condemn adversaries. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared his intent to rebalance U.S. foreign policy to advance national interests and "core values," and has said it is time to refocus American diplomacy on "natural rights” grounded in traditional Western conceptions of core freedoms.
These “America First” shifts are reverberating internationally, including at the United Nations. They have deprived the world body of one of its most ardent—if often selective —champions of human rights, as well as of financial resources. To be sure, the issue of human rights has often bedeviled U.S.-UN relations, given the United States’ traditional elevation of civil and political over economic, social, and cultural rights. But the American retreat from leadership threatens to accelerate the erosion of global human rights norms and the existing multilateral architecture created to defend them, particularly in the context of surging authoritarianism, geopolitical rivalry, and the global humanitarian crisis.
How much does this shift in U.S. leadership matter to the international human rights regime? How might it change the definition of and respect for global norms? What countries may step into the void left by the United States, and how? Will the human rights approaches of the last eighty years need to change?
To explore these and other questions please join Stewart Patrick in conversation with Bruno Stagno Ugarte, chief advocacy officer at Human Rights Watch, Martin Kimani, president and CEO of The Africa Center, and Allison Lombardo, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs.
