Biden cannot guarantee that a new US administration in four or eight years will not again turn back the clock on human rights, but he can take steps to make that retrenchment more difficult. Those steps would make the US government a more reliable member of the global human rights system.
Obviously, the more a rights-respecting policy is enshrined in legislation, the harder it is to reverse, which a Democratic majority in the US Congress may make possible . Without two-thirds of the Senate, the prospect remains remote of the United States joining most of the rest of the world in ratifying the major human rights treaties that it has long neglected. For the most part, Biden will have to resort to executive orders and presidential policy to undo the damage of the Trump years. Such steps by Biden would in principle be reversible, but they can be done in a way that makes it harder for the next president to make a 180-degree turn.
To provide greater staying power to a renewed commitment to human rights, Biden needs to reframe how these rights are understood in the United States. As noted, Jimmy Carter accomplished such a reframing when he introduced human rights as an element of US foreign policy. Many of Carter’s successors did not share his commitment to human rights, but none formally rejected it. It had struck a chord with the US public and met a global popular demand. So, for example, although Ronald Reagan broke with Carter’s commitment in Central America and elsewhere, he still ended up institutionalizing the State Department’s reporting on human rights and played an important role in pushing for democratic change in Chile and the Soviet bloc. Biden should aspire to a similar reconceptualization as Carter achieved.
The moment is ripe because the pandemic has laid bare gross disparities in access to health care, food, and other basic necessities, while the Black Lives Matter movement has spotlighted deep-seated racial injustice. Many people in the United States remain hostile to governmental efforts to remedy these human rights violations, which is part of why no administration has taken them on, but the extraordinary events of 2020 could provide a spur for action by having exposed the common interest in respect for everyone’s rights. The challenge for Biden is to seize that opportunity and use it to entrench respect for human rights as a central element of US policy at home and abroad.
One way would be by more regularly framing social issues in terms of rights. Traditionally, the US government has been more focused on civil and political rights than on economic, social, and cultural rights. It has ratified the leading treaty on the former, which codifies rights such as freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, and the right not to be tortured, but never the companion treaty on the latter, which addresses such rights as those concerning health, housing, and food. Yet the pandemic has shown how linked these concepts are – for example, how censorship about a government’s response to the pandemic undermines people’s ability to demand that resources be devoted to their health rather than the government’s political interests. Indeed, both sets of rights often can be found in US law. Biden could begin to speak about human rights in the broader terms in which most people understand them.
With the pandemic still raging, an obvious place to begin would be with Biden’s stated plan to bolster access to health care in the United States, which he should describe as a right. He should make clear that the issue is not simply reinforcing or expanding the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) but upholding everyone’s right to see a doctor without bankrupting their family. Similarly, as he pushes for federal aid to workers left unemployed by the lockdown, he should make clear that everyone is entitled to an adequate standard of living – that the richest government in the world is supposed to help people put food on the table even if they have lost their jobs in tough times. As he addresses the closing of schools, he should speak about the right to education – that a family’s ability to educate its children should not depend on whether it can afford a strong internet connection and a laptop. The more that people in the United States recognize that human rights reflect fundamental values, the less they will allow each passing president to treat rights as mere policy preferences.
Facing his own extraordinary challenges, Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal and made the case for a “freedom from want” in his famous “Four Freedoms” speech. Biden should seize on this pivotal moment to enlarge upon that vision and make it a more permanent reality in the United States.
Even within the realm of civil and political rights, more regular reference to rights could help to reduce the major shifts in policy that have accompanied most changes of administration. For example, Biden has expressed a desire to curtail the risk of deportation and provide a path to legalization for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Because some two-thirds have been in the United States for a decade or more, many with US-citizen children and spouses, Biden could speak of their right to live with their family without the constant fear of deportation.
On the issues of racial discrimination in education, housing, health, or the criminal justice system, or the right to choose whether, when, or how to form a family, Biden could note not only that these rights are upheld by US law but also that they are seen as fundamental in most countries around the world. And he should certainly repudiate the Commission on Unalienable Rights, the brainchild of Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, which was a thinly disguised effort to pick and choose among rights instead of recognizing them as a set of binding obligations. That ploy was music to the ears of the world’s autocrats.
More regular invocation of rights will not alone be enough but it could help to shift the public conversation about the fundamental values involved. That might make it harder for the next president to do an about-face.
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