Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addresses the Heritage Foundation’s President’s Club meeting in Washington on Tuesday. (Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says his department’s new “Commission on Unalienable Rights,” which held its first public meeting Wednesday, aims to develop a document by mid-2020 that will make clear what precisely are “fundamental human rights and why they matter so much to America.”

The initiative comes at a time when repressive regimes around the world are subverting the concept of human rights – a point highlighted by Pompeo in a speech Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation, where he cited as an example the Maduro regime in Venezuela’s recent election onto the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC).

He returned to the subject Wednesday during an interview on Tony Perkins’ national radio show Washington Watch, citing the HRC election as an example of how humankind has “deviated” from what human rights actually are.

“We’ve become confused, not just here in the United States, but around the world,” he said. “You see something as hypocritical as the government of Venezuela being appointed a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Commission [sic].”

When the notion of human rights is distorted, Pompeo argued, at least two problems arise.

“One is that you’ll end up with people asserting rights that we all know are fundamentally at odds with the most fundamental ideas that come out of, not just Christianity but all the Abrahamic faiths,” he said.

The second problem is that “when you use the word ‘right’ for something that is a mere preference,” Pompeo said, that diverts energy and attention away from “the things which are truly central to human dignity – the capacity for individuals to express their own conscience, and the things that you and I and I think nearly every American has come to understand.”

Although it is a U.S. initiative, he said that when the commission produces its outcome document he expects it to be something that “citizens all around the world will be able to hold up.”

“We will also then go out and share this, and share this vision with people all across America and all across the world so they can come to understand that this exceptional nation here in the United States is not embarrassed by the fact that we cherish those fundamental rights which our Creator has provided for us.”

Prof. Mary Ann Glendon chairs the new commission. (Photo by Brooks Kraft LLC/Sygma via Getty Images)

‘Natural law and natural rights’

When he first announced the formation of the advisory commission last July, Pompeo described its members as “human rights experts, philosophers, and activists, Republicans, Democrats, and independents of varied background and beliefs.”

It is chaired by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, a conservative pro-lifer who served as ambassador to the Vatican in the George W. Bush administration.

Glendon, who joined Pompeo at that announcement, thanked him “for giving a priority to human rights at this moment when basic human rights are being misunderstood by many, manipulated by many, and ignored by the world’s worst human rights violators.”

The initiative has stoked considerable controversy at home.

An early Federal Register notice about the commission referred to human rights discourse having “departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”

Critics viewed the language as sinister.

“We know that references to ‘natural law and natural rights’ are code words used by the religious right and social conservatives to advance anti-LGBTQ and anti-women’s rights agendas,” wrote the ACLU’s Jamil Dakwar and Sonia Gill in July.

The same month a letter to Pompeo raising concerns about the commission’s aims and composition was signed by hundreds of human rights advocates, liberal activists, former policy-makers, and organizations including the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the Human Rights Campaign.

The signatories called the commission’s purpose “harmful to the global effort to protect the rights of all people and a waste of resources.”

Its membership, the letter charged, “lacks ideological diversity and appears to reflect a clear interest in limiting human rights, including the rights of women and LGBTQI individuals.”

Apart from Glendon, the commission’s members are: Stanford University humanities professor Russel Berman; Hoover Institution senior fellow Peter Berkowitz, Director of Policy Planning at the State Department; Kiron Skinner, former Director of Policy Planning at the department; University of Notre Dame law professor Paolo Carozza; American Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf; Lantos Foundation president Katrina Lantos Swett, a former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF); rabbi and scholar Meir Soloveichik; the executive director of the Seymour Institute on Black Church and Policy Studies, Jacqueline Rivers; University of South Carolina philosophy professor Christopher Tollefsen; U.C. Irvine professor of German David Tse-Chien Pan; and State Department policy planning staffer F. Cartwright Weiland.