By Desirée Cormier Smith and Jessica Stern

Read in The Harvard Kennedy School Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights

The views expressed below are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.

The UDHR answered a century of catastrophe by insisting that human dignity is not conditional or defined by power. If we trade that universal standard for an elastic notion of rights that shifts with ideology or power, we are not returning to principle — we are retreating from it.

Seventy-seven years ago this week, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II, nations from across the world, including the United States, gathered in Paris to formally adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This document was far from ceremonial; it was a global triumph of humanity, a binding declaration that the world should no longer tolerate torture, political imprisonment, ethnic cleansing, or persecution based on identity or belief. Today, under President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio, the United States is not merely drifting away from international human rights law; it is deliberately working to undermine it.

The UDHR echoed the core ideals of America’s founding — that all people possess inherent dignity and basic rights – and expanded them into a universal standard, applied across borders and enforced through international law, diplomacy, and accountability. After the atrocities of the twentieth century, the United States and the world declared that human rights must be globally respected and that no government had the authority to deny them. The U.S. helped lead the development of the UDHR, with Eleanor Roosevelt serving as chair of its drafting committee, and while we know that the United States has never fully lived up to these ideals, it has never walked away from them. Until now.

Today, the Trump Administration and many of its allies have begun to instead use the language of “natural rights,” which may sound like a benign change of phrasing, but make no mistake, this is much more than a rhetorical shift. It is a deliberate attempt to dismiss eight decades of progress through which the international community built universal, enforceable protections that transcend borders, ideology, and religion.

“Natural rights” aspires to replace the internationally accepted human rights framework with a set of religiously framed freedoms that elevate national sovereignty, reject universality — the principle that all governments are bound by the same basic standards — and deny the evolution of international norms.

During the first Trump Administration, the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights sought to re-align U.S. diplomacy with their interpretation of the “founders’ conception of natural law” — a concept that coexisted with slavery, the denial of rights to women and much more — and in so doing elevated property and religious freedom while sidelining racial and gender equality, reproductive rights, and LGBTQI+ protections. The second Trump Administration has revived and expanded this framework, and senior officials now describe “natural rights” as the moral foundation of U.S. foreign policy, with one political appointee even writing that America’s partnership with Europe rests on a “Western tradition of natural law, virtue ethics, and national sovereignty.”

Because natural rights are not defined in international law, we are left to infer their meaning from Trump officials’ public statements, and what emerges is a doctrine framed as inherent and God-given — “endowed by the Creator” and superseding any government or treaty — a formulation that places religious belief above the rule of law. Putting aside the clear violation of the separation of church and state this poses, it is worth emphasizing that one can believe that God endowed certain rights to all human beings while also believing in the need for legal standards by which governments are held accountable when they violate them. These are not incompatible views.

Natural rights aspires to replace the internationally accepted human rights framework with a set of religiously framed freedoms that elevate national sovereignty, reject universality — the principle that all governments are bound by the same basic standards — and deny the evolution of international norms.

Under a “natural rights” framework, rights are also treated as fixed rather than capable of expanding, a stance used to dismiss what the proponents call “rights inflation” and to justify a regressive worldview tolerant of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and child abuse. This logic is clearly, fundamentally flawed: societies progress by expanding rights, not freezing them in time.

Administration officials also root natural rights in Western and Christian intellectual traditions, tracing a lineage from Greece and Rome to Christianity and the American founding. This narrow framing elevates white, Western traditions as the sole source of moral authority while devaluing the wisdom and legal traditions of the rest of the world. By grounding rights in the unilateral claims of national leaders rather than in universal standards, the Administration rejects the authority of international human rights bodies and argues that each country should define rights for itself — a rationale that has historically been invoked to justify systems of racial oppression, gender discrimination, and theocratic repression, from apartheid in South Africa to Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

This approach nefariously elevates some rights as more legitimate than others, placing religious freedom and property rights above sexual and reproductive health, gender and racial equality, and LGBTQI+ protections, which are dismissed as mere political claims. This is where the natural rights framework collapses, because there can be no legitimate hierarchy of rights. Human rights are equal and indivisible, and recasting them as ranked or negotiable under a “natural rights” frame is ultimately an attempt by the Trump Administration to project its domestic culture war aims onto global human rights policy.

As former senior State Department officials responsible for human rights policy, reporting, and diplomacy for marginalized racial and ethnic communities and LGBTQI+ persons, we saw how dissidents relied on documentation of abuses of international human rights standards to survive, how civil society leaders around the world trusted that abuses would be recorded accurately, and how governments changed their behavior when they were held accountable to universal standards. That very system is what is being quietly dismantled.

When persecution is erased from the record, dissidents lose protection, judges lack facts, and people fleeing danger are pushed back into it.

We are already seeing the devastating impacts of this shift. The Trump Administration has grossly distorted the State Department’s annual human rights reports by softening scrutiny of governments that jail political opponents or censor the press, while targeting democratic allies for allowing abortion; providing gender affirming care; or advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion practices to promote greater participation in society of those who had been locked out of opportunities simply because of their identity. In the human rights reports released by the Trump Administration this year, almost every single report downplayed or removed entirely patterns of censorship, political imprisonment, or racial or ethnically-motivated violence. In a bizarre twist, the State Department accused France of committing human rights violations because it protects access to abortion and provides transgender people with appropriate healthcare.

The annual human rights reports are not symbolic. They are the evidentiary backbone for asylum claims, diplomatic pressure, and human rights sanctions. When persecution is erased from the record, dissidents lose protection, judges lack facts, and people fleeing danger are pushed back into it.

Diplomacy grounded in conscience, dignity, and universality is not idealism. It is statecraft at its most pragmatic. The world used to look to the United States to uphold that standard, but as the government continues to stray, others will fill the vacuum, including those who see human rights not as a universal obligation, but as a privilege reserved for the few.

We cannot allow that reversal — not after what humanity has already paid to learn these lessons. “Natural rights” may sound like continuity with our founding ideals, but as now deployed, it is their abandonment. It is a framework designed to sound benign and look principled while excusing governments that narrow dignity by ideology or theology. The UDHR answered a century of catastrophe by insisting that human dignity is not conditional or defined by power. If we trade that universal standard for an elastic notion of rights that shifts with ideology or power, we are not returning to principle — we are retreating from it. The world will recognize that retreat for what it is, and history will not excuse it.

We mark the signing of the UDHR each year on December 10 because the UDHR was humanity’s answer to an unforgiving lesson: when governments decide whose rights are real, abuse follows. Universal human rights were meant to end that experiment. “Natural rights” as now espoused by the Trump Administration attempts to reopen the door.

Desirée Cormier Smith was the inaugural Special Representative for Racial Equity and
Justice; Jessica Stern was the Special Envoy for the Advancement of the Human Rights
of LGBTQI+ Persons at the U.S. Department of State. They are now both co-founders
and co-presidents of the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice, promoting human rights as a
central pillar of U.S. foreign policy.