On July 16, 2020, the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights released its first draft report to the general public. The report emphasizes the interplay among freedom, democracy, and human rights, and concludes that the promotion of “social and economic rights are essential to a comprehensive foreign policy.”
“Every human law has just so much of the nature of law as is derived from the law of nature,” Thomas Aquinas wrote. “But if at any point it deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of the law.” Aquinas’s observation that human law either ratifies natural law or perverts it is a good North Star in promoting human rights around the world.