The government of the United States led by President Donald Trump has sought to reinterpret the definition of “human rights” within the nation’s justice system. Under reports by media, the government of Trump significantly is reducing the State Department’s annual reports detailing global human rights to eliminate long-standing criticisms over abuses like oppressive prison conditions, corruption in the government and inhibitions on voting.
Over the past several decades, reporting designed to inform congressional consideration of foreign assistance and security aid has noted government measures such as limiting freedom of movement and peaceful assembly.
Yet those reports will no longer denounce practices such as keeping political prisoners without process. State Department workers are instructed in an editing memo and other documents received by NPR to “streamline” the reports by cutting them down to just that which is legally mandatory.
The memo explains the changes seek to bring the reports into conformance with new U.S. policy and “recently issued Executive Orders.” Officially titled “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” the annual reports, by law, must be a “full and complete report regarding the status of internationally recognized human rights.”
Human rights activists report the cuts equate to an American withdrawal from its role as the world’s human rights guardian.
“What this is, is a signal that the United States is no longer going to [pressure] other countries to uphold those rights that guarantee civic and political freedoms — the right to speak, to express yourself, to gather, to protest, to organise,”
said Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International, USA. A State Department spokesperson refused comment on the memo or the reports on human rights. NPR had two sources within the process and confirmed the memo’s authenticity.
The reports, which appear in March or April nearly every year, are eagerly awaited by foreign leaders and diplomats who have a vested interest in how their nations are represented. The 2024 reports were originally finished up in January, prior to President Trump’s inauguration, but they’ve been re-edited by the new administration. State Department officials indicate that the updated versions won’t be published until May.
The reports NPR examined affirm Politico reporting that the following will be deleted: reports of violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as all mentions of DEI.
By statute, the State Department publishes annual reports on each nation, and they historically adhere to a single general template. The Trump administration memo’s cuts are not country-specific. Instead, they remove entire categories of abuses from all the reports.
But all deletions are not equal. The Trump administration has just negotiated the resettlement of immigrants from the U.S. into El Salvador’s infamous prison system.
In a leaked copy of the upcoming report on that nation prepared for NPR, the prison conditions section is eliminated. The only traces of those abuses are mentions of prison death reports that fall under the rubric of “extrajudicial killings” and a note about abuse at the hands of prison guards in a legislatively required section on “Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.”
In the Hungarian report, a copy of which was made available marked up as a template for how the new instructions could be implemented, the subsection “Corruption in Government” is lined out. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been referred to as an authoritarian, and earlier reports have included mentions of limitations on civil liberties. President Trump has referred to him as “a great man and a great leader in Europe.”
András Lederer of Hungary’s oldest and largest human rights organization, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, said the State Department’s new policy undermines the leverage of human rights activists in nations with a poor human rights record.
“You’re taking away pressure, and it certainly sends the message to the perpetrators that this is not high on [the U.S.’s] priority list anymore,”
Lederer said.
Individuals specializing in human rights work indicated that they are concerned with the impact that the reductions will have on the influence of the documents among the international community.
“You can’t overestimate the value in the real world of the State Department annual human rights reports being credible and impartial,”
said Christopher Le Mon, who until January was a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour.
“You also can’t overestimate the harm it will cause to that credibility if the Trump administration’s revisions are viewed to narrow — not only the scope of what are characterized as human rights, but also if those revisions are viewed to play favourites.”