Leading public intellectual urges U.S. Secretary of State to “seize the opportunity… to highlight what is great in America” by partnering with Nahdlatul Ulama
“The [Unalienable Rights] Commission’s 2020 breakthrough with Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama… offers a model for orienting U.S. partnerships and friendships around a shared commitment to the basic rights and fundamental freedoms that give expression to the dignity of the individual”
~ Peter Berkowitz, Real Clear Politics
“Secretary Rubio Should Build on the Commission on Unalienable Rights”
WASHINGTON, DC — On 2 February 2022, former Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, Dr. Peter Berkowitz, published an open letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging him to establish wide-ranging cooperation with Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and its G20 Religion Forum (R20).
A Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Dr. Berkowitz described NU as “an eminent Muslim organization — with a membership greater in number than the populations of most nation-states and from a country with the world’s largest Muslim population — that [is] keen to promote mutual understanding of peoples and nations grounded in respect for universal rights.”
The article, published in Real Clear Politics, states that:
The work of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, which then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo created in 2019, provides the Trump administration and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in particular an excellent opportunity to reaffirm the traditional American understanding of universal rights. Moreover, the commission’s 2020 breakthrough with Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest independent Muslim organization with a membership of some 100 million, offers a model for orienting U.S. partnerships and friendships around a shared commitment to the basic rights and fundamental freedoms that give expression to the dignity of the individual. Too little known in the West, NU promotes a form of Islam that embraces toleration and abjures the use of religion as a pretext for violence. The organization remains eager to work with the United States in defense of the rights shared by all human beings…
Shortly after publication of the commission’s report in the summer of 2020, representatives of Nahdlatul Ulama Chairman KH Yahya Cholil Staquf conveyed to me NU’s enthusiasm for the report. They said that its approach to human rights reflected the pluralism, toleration, and human dignity taught by NU’s school of Islam. In October 2020, at NU’s invitation, Secretary Pompeo presented the report in Jakarta.
The Biden administration chose to turn a blind eye to Nahdlatul Ulama’s cooperation with the United States in defense of toleration and religious liberty. Then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken went further, denouncing the Commission on Unalienable Rights’ report. In March 2021, in remarks delivered barely two months after the Biden administration entered office, Blinken kept his confirmation-hearing promise to “repudiate” the report’s allegedly “unbalanced views.” Yet it was Blinken who grossly distorted matters. He baselessly accused the report of omissions, distortions, fabrications, and falsehoods that it did not commit. At the same time, he ignored the bridge the report built to an eminent Muslim organization — with a membership greater in number than the populations of most nation-states and from a country with the world’s largest Muslim population — that was keen to promote mutual understanding of peoples and nations grounded in respect for universal rights.
The Rubio State Department should seize the opportunity fostered by the Pompeo State Department and cast aside by the Blinken State Department.
Nahdlatul Ulama continues to organize international fora to gather representatives of the world’s largest religions to discuss and advance the cause of toleration, religious liberty, and human rights. In 2022, NU organized the G20 Religion Forum [R20]. In its capacity as 2022 president and host in Bali of the annual G20 meetings, Indonesia inaugurated this international summit of religious leaders and scholars, which featured the Commission on Unalienable Rights’ report. In 2023 at Princeton University, NU — along with the Center for Shared Civilizational Values, which works closely with it and the G20 Religion Forum — teamed with Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions to host approximately 40 religious figures and professors from numerous countries for a two-day conference on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The conference organizers believed that the UDHR provides the best available basis for forming consensus among peoples and nations about the basic rights and fundamental freedoms that all nation-states should respect.
Two major events next year provide the Rubio State Department special opportunities to take advantage of the commission’s report and of Nahdlatul Ulama’s labors on behalf of human rights.
In 2026, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The State Department should organize events at American embassies around the world aimed at educating citizens of other nations about American principles of freedom and democracy and American constitutional government’s grounding in unalienable rights.
In addition, the United States will host the G20 meetings next year. The State Department should work with Nahdlatul Ulama to include an accompanying G20 religious forum. After all, no nation has done more than the United States to recognize the central importance of religious liberty and economic liberty to human dignity and the inseparable connection between those unalienable rights and the other basic rights and fundamental freedoms.
Through such initiatives, the Rubio State Department can highlight what is great in America by giving human rights their due.
On 27 February 2025, renowned legal scholar and political philosopher Robert P. George published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal also calling upon Secretary of State Marco Rubio to
reinstitute the State Department’s efforts during the first Trump administration to restore the original understanding of human rights [which] have long been a driving moral force in America’s foreign policy. Ronald Reagan made the case against Soviet expansionism and oppression in the language of human rights. The rights to life, religious freedom, freedom of expression, and due process of law are all rooted, as Martin Luther King Jr. observed, in natural law and enshrined in our nation’s founding documents. An understanding of rights as deriving from the inherent and equal dignity of every person echoes the American Founders’ prophetic proclamation “that all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator” with “unalienable rights.” …
Mr. Rubio ought to revive the report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights and use it as a guidance document to reform human rights policy. Americans deserve a State Department that defends rights that accord with the constitutional order that our Founders established.
Dr. George is a Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
On 13 – 14 December 2023, Professor George and the James Madison Program hosted international religious authorities and scholars representing the world’s major faith traditions, who gathered for the R20 Princeton Conference on the Future of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and to build upon the momentum of previous G20 Religion Forum (R20) summits held in Bali, Surabaya, and Jakarta, Indonesia.
Co-chaired by Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law (emerita) at Harvard Law School and former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, and NU General Chairman KH. Yahya Cholil Staquf, the conference was also sponsored by Nahdlatul Ulama, the Center for Shared Civilizational Values, the R20, and the Humanitarian Islam movement.
Five days before the R20 Princeton Conference and two days before the UDHR’s 75th anniversary, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Professor Glendon titled “There’s Life Yet in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”:
The Center for Shared Civilizational Values, founded by the Indonesia-based Nahdlatul Ulama, wants to build a movement to strengthen a rules-based international order grounded in universal principles. Joining in that endeavor is the world’s largest network of political parties, Centrist Democrat International, composed mostly of European and Latin American political parties. In 2020 both organizations called for renewed global support of the human-rights principles in the Universal Declaration. That East-West collaboration is evidence that the core principles of the Universal Declaration have foundations in most of the world’s great philosophical and religious systems.
None of this would have surprised the men and women who brought the postwar human-rights project to life. They had seen human beings at their best and worst. But while the human race is capable of gross violations of human rights, it is also capable of imagining that there are rights to violate and articulating those rights in declarations and constitutions. People can orient their conduct toward the norms they recognize and feel the need to make excuses when their conduct falls short.
Seventy-five years ago, these visionaries forged a consensus that helped millions achieve better standards of life and greater freedom. Before giving up on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we should ask: Is it really going to take more wars, and more horrors, to breathe new life into a few enduring principles of human decency?
From left to right: Nahdlatul Ulama Chairman KH. Yahya Cholil Staquf; Dr. Timothy Samuel Shah, CSCV Director of Strategic Initiatives, who moderated the two-day R20 Princeton UDHR Conference; Prof. Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard; and Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, Anglican Primate of Nigeria
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