Washington D.C., Jul 8, 2019 / 13:00 pm America/Denver (CNA).
Mary Ann Glendon, former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, will head a new human rights advisory body to the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday.
“It’s a sad commentary on our times that more than 70 years after the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, gross violations continue throughout the world,” Secretary Pompeo stated at a July 8 press conference announcing the new Commission on Unalienable Human Rights.
Pompeo said that “the time is right for an informed review of American human rights in foreign policy,” and that Glendon was “the perfect person to chair this effort” and chair the new commission.
Glendon, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See in 2008-09, is a Harvard Law professor with expertise in international human rights.
She was named to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences by Pope St. John Paul II in 1994, led a delegation of the Holy See to the fourth U.N. Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995, and served as head of the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences from 2004-14. In 2018, she resigned as a memeber of the Board of Superintendence, which oversees the IOR, commonly known as the Vatican Bank.