Human Rights

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its 2020 Annual Report and recommended the US government include Turkey on the State Department’s “Special Watch List” for “engaging in or tolerating severe violations of religious freedom.”

Some in the West may hope that COVID-19 exposes the Chinese Communist Party’s lies and human rights violations while sparking mass protests. Meanwhile, the pandemic spreads in the West and complicates the geopolitical rivalry between the US and China.

No one concerned about the erosion of freedom in the world can afford to be complacent about the state of international human rights, or simply blame it on bad actors. The UN’s bureaucratic human rights mechanisms increasingly fail to protect individual human rights, yet offer cover to human rights abusers.

While talking about persecuted Christians, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the UK will “stand with Christians everywhere, in solidarity” and will defend their right to practice their faith. What would this policy look like?

Islam and Christianity have overlapping views of religious freedom, and both are guilty of religious persecution. Two recently published books address these realities: Religious Freedom in Islam: The Fate of a Universal Human Right in the Muslim World Today by Daniel Philpott and Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom by Robert Louis Wilken.

An estimated 74.6 percent of North Korean defectors become victims of human trafficking in China, and the situation is worse for female defectors.

Even though people may not rely on universal human rights rhetoric to guide their specific decisions, Ignatieff argues that the structure of global human rights has contributed indirectly to global solidarity by providing a foundation for people’s ordinary virtues.

America’s collective consciousness has been assaulted of late by the rapid-fire reports of mass shootings across the country. What was…

If an assessment of and recommitment to human rights protections is the mandate of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, I humbly suggest they study the current status of the most basic rights and lessons to be drawn from the post-9/11 context.