When Marco Rubio, then a Florida senator, appeared as a potential nominee for secretary of state, many people in the human rights community were cautiously optimistic. Compared to other potential nominees, Rubio was known in Congress as a strong, if inconsistent, advocate for human rights. He knew the inner workings of U.S. human rights structures and could be counted on to speak forcefully to the government’s obligation to protect human rights, often reaching across the aisle to do so and demonstrating that rights are nonpartisan.
Fast-forward to today, and Secretary of State Rubio appears to have completely abandoned the principles that he apparently held in the Senate. Though he once proclaimed that “[t]he United States must remain adamant in the defense of human rights,” as secretary of state, Rubio rarely mentions rights—unless to impugn them as part of some so-called woke agenda. Instead, he has taken on a different slogan: “We are not here to play social worker. We are here to win.”
With so much focus on the administration’s militarized and often unlawful foreign policy—including the invasions of Venezuela and Iran and hundreds of extrajudicial killings in airstrikes at sea—it’s easy to overlook the destruction that Rubio has caused to the diplomatic system that offers alternatives. But over the past nearly 18 months, Rubio has led an all-out assault on human rights in U.S. statecraft, mostly bypassing Congress to do so.
Rubio has slashed foreign assistance and humanitarian aid, decimated human rights programs addressing everything from torture to atrocity prevention, politicized the department’s annual human rights reports, gutted key human rights offices and bureaus, withdrawn or disengaged from global human rights systems at the U.N. and elsewhere, and threatened international justice mechanisms, all while promoting a vague “natural rights” framework to supplant the concept of international human rights.
At this point, he must be seen as the chief architect and implementor of dismantling the State Department systems that were designed to uphold and engage the rules-based order that protects human rights and promotes global peace and security.
As secretary of state, Rubio has overseen a maximalist interpretation of President Donald Trump’s executive orders—chiefly, the slashing of foreign aid programs. No one was prepared for Rubio’s chaotic implementation of Trump’s Day One executive order titled “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.”
Rubio’s zealous and cruel overapplication of the order required already-funded humanitarian and development programs to stop immediately, causing enormous suffering. Lifesaving drugs were cut off. Some reports emerged of hospitals removing IVs from patients’ arms. Domestic violence shelters, rape survivor services, and torture rehabilitation centers shuttered, leaving even child survivors of sexual violence and people at high risk of suicide without care.
U.S. foreign aid needed reform, but Rubio’s cuts were akin to burning down a house to fix a leaking sink. The scale and speed of the cuts created a life-threatening vacuum. Organizations scrambled for carve-outs and waivers, filed lawsuits, and tried to maneuver backdoor deals. Others fired nearly all their staff.
No amount of bureaucratic wrangling could circumvent Rubio’s next act, carried out hand-in-glove with Elon Musk: the complete destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Despite Rubio’s claims otherwise, people died as a result. Indeed, ending what had been Washington’s flagship means of saving lives may eventually be seen as one of the deadliest human-made disasters in modern history, estimated by some researchers to eventually lead to millions of deaths and gutting civil society around the world, with consequences continuing to mount.
The result is, as Human Rights Watch framed it, “every autocrat’s dream.”
Perversely, while Rubio suffocated lifesaving aid programs, he also oversaw the approval of $30 million of U.S. support to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which operated militarized “aid distribution” sites, in the vicinity of which the U.N.’s top human rights office reported more than 2,000 deaths in four months. This upside-down world has become Rubio’s calling card: sacrificing lives to advance untested and irresponsible experiments.
Rubio simultaneously dismantled the human rights infrastructure of the State Department itself. Without formally involving Congress, he fired staff en masse and eliminated or drastically reduced offices and bureaus that advanced women’s equality; pushed for accountability for and the prevention of atrocities; and advocated for democracy, human rights, labor, and refugees—to name a few.
Rubio claimed that such functions had been moved under regional bureaus and missions abroad, but that never happened. Now, dwindling numbers of overworked individual human rights staffers struggle to keep up with portfolios that were previously tackled by whole teams. Worse, no one works on some issues at all.
One human rights program at the State Department that survived Rubio’s wrecking ball is the congressionally mandated annual human rights reports. Previously, the reports—though not perfect—catalogued the state of human rights in countries around the world, forming a vital resource not only for diplomats but also for everyone from lawmakers making funding decisions to U.S. investors doing due diligence to courts assessing asylum claims.
No longer.
Rubio—who had praised previous iterations of the reports as a senator—has rendered them unrecognizable, brazenly prioritizing political agendas over consistent accounting of human rights violations around the world.
The first annual country reports released under Rubio, covering 2024, eliminated entire sections, including reporting on discrimination against women, children, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ people, and stopped assessing the conduct of elections.
They also selectively focused on violations in some countries while ignoring them in others, depending on the administration’s political goals. For instance, the reports blatantly sanitized the records of Trump-allied governments in El Salvador, Hungary, and Israel, making it easier for the administration to deport people or send weapons to places where authorities violate human rights.
Leaked instructions for the next reports—covering 2025—suggest an even more ideological and skewed interpretation of human rights, including such absurdities as requiring policies like affirmative action to be reported as human rights violations while barring mentions of infringements on the right to the freedom of assembly.
In line with Trump’s “America First” agenda, Rubio has enforced a go-it-alone foreign policy that treats international law and human rights as a constraint, not a principle. While Trump withdrew the country from the U.N. Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, and UNESCO, Rubio walked away from a slew of U.N. bodies focusing on children in armed conflict, sexual violence in armed conflict, and violence against children, among others.
Some of Rubio’s withdrawals were overtly performative and racist, such as when he cited “DEI mandates” as justification for leaving bodies such as the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, a body of the U.N. Human Rights Council, which the United States had already left. Rubio is still overseeing a review of U.S. participation in thousands of other conventions, treaties, and organizations—again an overzealous execution of an executive order.
Under Rubio, for the first time, the United States has also refused to participate in the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process, a cornerstone of the international human rights system. Although a handful of countries have failed to participate at certain stages of the UPR process, every U.N. member state has engaged in the UPR since its first cycle began in 2008. The unprecedented U.S. boycott puts the entire mechanism at risk. If the United States fully abandons the UPR, other governments around the world that violate human rights will cheer and likely follow suit. Indeed, some have already approvingly noted Rubio’s sanctioning of International Criminal Court judges.
It seems that Rubio simply does not believe in international human rights law and institutions based on universal principles at all. Sure enough, his State Department now advances a vague concept of “natural rights,” even adding an “Office of Natural Rights” to lead policy for the dramatically reduced and restructured Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
“Natural rights” are allegedly grounded in human nature and divine order, and in practice accrue only to certain people—namely, Western Christians. They are a direct affront to the concept of universal human rights based in international law. They also help explain Rubio’s selective application of rights, from bragging about extrajudicial killings in U.S. airstrikes at sea, to revoking visas from protesters with whose speech he disagrees, to sanctioning activists fighting extremist and anti-vaccine disinformation online.
U.S. foreign policy has long been rife with contradictions around human rights, and some of the gravest recent wounds to universal norms began under Rubio’s predecessor, Antony Blinken. Now, under Rubio, the State Department appears to be very near to giving up on human rights entirely. Despite a few instances where policy decisions have aligned with human rights advocacy asks—such as, for many groups, sanctions against various bad actors in Africa and Latin America—Rubio has contributed to large-scale erosion of U.S. human rights leadership, weakened global human rights mechanisms, undermined cooperation abroad on human rights, and hamstrung Washington’s capacity to respond to abuses.
Taken together, Rubio’s most enduring legacy may end up being the collapse of U.S. capacity to shape and enforce global norms and policies at the U.N. and other spaces.
None of this advances U.S. interests, but it does open a path for other governments to exert their visions of human rights. Indeed, China’s government—an egregious violator of human rights—is vocal and present at human rights convenings where the United States is not, and in June, it released a new five-year national human rights strategy. In contrast, on the same day, Rubio made one of his rare mentions of rights—a throwaway reference at an event marking a partnership with the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
This does not have to be Rubio’s legacy. The modern human rights system emerged from the devastation of a horrific world war. Countries agreed on inherent rights that must be granted universal protection so every individual can live freely, equally, and in dignity, regardless of who or where they are.
This extraordinary achievement—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the system that followed—occurred with U.S. leadership. Now Rubio has a choice: whether the United States, with him as secretary of state, will be instrumental in its destruction.
