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A long-awaited report on global human rights from the Trump administration features hand-wringing about purported anti-white racism, downplays abuses against women and completely omits references to anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
Last month, I wrote about how the Trump administration’s deep cuts to the State Department budget and workforce had delayed a congressionally authorized annual report that the State Department compiles on international human rights. Now, the report has finally arrived. And it’s a deeply politicized document that bears all the blemishes one might expect of a State Department that counts at least one official with links to white supremacists.
As NBC News noted, the report is a tenth as long as last year’s report and has already been condemned by human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. It includes Trump’s bogus claims of anti-white violence and plunder under South Africa’s government, a claim that echoes white supremacist talking points. In a departure from previous reports, the Trumpified version completely omits sections dedicated to abuses against women and LGBTQ people, while criticizing “free speech” abuses by countries like Brazil and members of the European Union for attempting to curb the spread of far-right disinformation and hate speech. In the case of Brazil, the report also says the country’s judiciary has unfairly oppressed followers of former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally who is under house arrest while he is on trial on charges of plotting a coup (a charge he denies).
The report also lets Trump’s authoritarian allies off the hook in other ways. For example, despite extensive documentation of human rights abuses by El Salvador’s MAGA-aligned, self-described dictator Nayib Bukele, the State Department claimed to find no “significant” abuses in the country to which the Trump administration renditioned several hundred immigrants. The report also cut a section on Russian corruption that had been included by the previous administration.
In its section on Israel, West Bank and Gaza, the report lists under the category “War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity, and Evidence of Acts that May Constitute Genocide, or Conflict-related Abuses” only the following: “Terrorist organizations Hamas and Hizballah continue to engage in the indiscriminate targeting of Israeli civilians in violation of the law of armed conflict.” The report makes no reference to Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza or to tactics that some international groups have gone so far as to label genocide.
Here’s how State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce characterized the revised report, according to NBC News:
‘The Human Rights Report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancy, increases report readability, and is responsive to the legislative mandates that underpin the report, rather than an expansive list of politically biased demands and assertions,’ Bruce said. ‘Individual reports are more readable, objective, true to their statutory origins, and more useful than ever before.’
That’s one way to describe a report that exaggerates some claims of human rights abuse while completely ignoring others. I tend to think the statement given to NBC News last week by an unnamed department official ahead of the report’s release is a bit more apt, if not honest:
‘We call out certain abuses that we think deserve highlighting, but just because we focus on one instance does not mean that we are not aware of other instances of human rights abuses,’ the official added, noting that all 198 countries and territories were listed in the reports.
So given the opportunity to call out human rights abuses, like those that target women and LGBTQ people, where it knows they exist, this administration seems to prefer to misuse this report to point to policies and places that don’t align with its right-wing ideology.