Trump administration rewrites and scales back annual human rights report
The Trump administration has considerably rewritten and reduced the American government’s annual report on world human rights violations.
The document, previously considered to be the most complete study of this kind by any government, considerably reduces the criticism of certain American allies such as Israel and El Salvador while increasing the disapproval of perceived enemies such as Brazil and South Africa.
Whole sections included in reports from previous years are also eliminated, considerably reducing the coverage of questions, including the corruption of the government and the persecution of LGBTQ +individuals.
The officials of the State Department say that it was “restructured” to “remove redundancies” and “increase readability”.
The report also describes the situation of human rights as having “aggravated” in major European democracies, including the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
The language used echoes the previous criticisms of the Trump administration and certain bosses of American technology which oppose the laws on the reduction of online misdeeds in certain European countries, describing them as attacks against freedom of expression.
Uzra Zeya, a former senior state official who now heads the human rights organization, accused the Trump administration of “emptying” decades of highly respected work on human rights protections and an “abandonment of fundamental values” in the United States.
“This sends a signal that there will be a free pass from the US government, that it will resemble the other way if a government is willing to conclude agreements or make the call for tenders of this administration,” she told the BBC.
The document was published after a long -standing period in the midst of the internal dissent reports in the State Department concerning its content.
It follows the internal directives published by political leaders earlier this year would have advised the staff to shorten reports aimed at deleting certain references to questions such as corruption and gender crimes, and follows certain decrees on related issues published by President Trump.
During a visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this year, Trump reprimanded “Western interventionists” and said that the United States would no longer be “to give you conferences on how to live or how to govern your own business”.
