russell berman stnfd

<div>Human rights advocates are also concerned about statements Glendon and other members have made in praise of governments accused of repeated human rights abuses.</div><div>
</div><div>Glendon argued in an article earlier this year for “flexible universalism,” urging human rights activists to respect other countries’ traditional concepts of human rights, PBS News reported. Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., a former State Department human rights chief, told the outlet that this policy would allow countries like China to further their abuses under the guise of “economic and social rights.”</div><div>
</div><div>Yusuf, the anti-abortion Zaytuna College president, praised the United Arab Emirates, a country accused by the State Department of extensive human rights abuses.</div><div>
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</div><div>Report Advertisement</div><div>Last year, he called the UAE “a country that is committed to tolerance,” according to PBS. “This is a country that is committed to civil society. It is one of the safest countries on the earth,” he said.</div><div>
</div><div>Yusuf also praised Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to seize new powers in a move objective observers have called “authoritarian.”</div><div>
</div><div>Yusuf didn’t see it that way, writing that Erdogan’s “desire to increase the executive powers of the president’s office is simply to move toward an American model as opposed to the current European one.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>Another commission member, Stanford professor Russell Berman, said last year that criticism of Saudi Arabia over the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was politically motivated.</b></div><div>
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</div><div>“The hue and cry about [Khashoggi] has really been — no surprise there — about the upcoming election, another effort to get at President Trump,” Berman said in an October interview with the Hoover Institution, before praising Saudi Arabia for being more moderate than Iran.</div><div>
</div><div>A senior administration official told PBS that the commission should be judged “on the work it produces rather than prejudging it based on selective quoting.”</div><div>
</div><div>But members’ beliefs matter when it comes to a commission tasked with redefining human rights.</div><div>
</div><div>“This effort looks particularly deliberate,” Masha Gessen wrote at The New Yorker. “If the United States asks the international community to redefine human rights as religious rights, it will have the support of a vast coalition of very different countries — a coalition of which Russia has, for a decade, been the informal leader. The subsequent reframing of human rights could change the work of international bodies — and the lives of millions of vulnerable people — for a long time to come.”</div><div>...</div>