By MAHR student Veronica Smaldone
Jakub Grygiel, professor in the Department of Politics at Catholic University, visited the
Master’s in Human Rights students in their Capstone course to share his perspective as an expert
on the history of American foreign policy and a former employee of the U.S. State Department.
Dr. Grygiel explained that in the last 40 years, the United States has expanded its portfolio of
“human rights” to such an extent that the movement founded in the wake of the Second World
War to protect global human rights, illuminated by advocates like Eleanor Roosevelt and the
other authors of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has lost its vitality. When every
cultural preference becomes a “right” which states must guarantee to their citizens, the
international effort to secure fundamental freedoms for all people — many of whom still live
under the violence of totalitarianism — becomes cumbersome and distracted. Worse yet, wealthy
nations are tempted to wield their offers of foreign aid as weapons, denying life-saving resources
to underdeveloped nations which do not yet live up to their standards of societal “progress.”
Our task as human rights advocates is to resist the temptation to dilute the concept of rights into
mere political tools which the powerful can use to exert influence. Uniformity of culture is not
the goal of international cooperation. The good — the true and unchanging good — of each and
every person across cultures, nationalities, and political structures, must remain the common
project of the family of nations around the world.
