Scathing GAO Analysis of the 2006 Trafficking in Persons Report

Each year, pursuant to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the Department of State submits to Congress a report on countries’ efforts to eliminate human trafficking. The report divides countries into three tiers, with Tier 1 including countries that have made significant efforts to comply with U.S. law’s minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking in persons, and Tier 3 including countries that have failed to make such efforts. Tier 3 countries risk losing non-humanitarian, non-trade-related assistance from the U.S.; since 2003, full or partial sanctions have been imposed on Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Liberia, Sudan, Equitorial Guinea, Cambodia, and Venzuela.

The 2006 Trafficking in Persons Report contains the following rankings:

Last week, however, the GAO released a scathing analysis of the State Department report. Here is the abstract:

This report has increased global awareness about trafficking in persons, encouraged action by some governments who failed to comply with the minimum standards, and raised the threat of sanctions against governments who did not make significant efforts to comply with these standards. The Department of State includes explanations of the rankings in the report, though they are not required under the TVPA. However, the report’s explanations for these ranking decisions are incomplete, and agencies do not consistently use the report to influence antitrafficking programs. Information about whether a country has a significant number of trafficking victims may be unavailable or unreliable, making the justification for some countries’ inclusion in the report debatable. Moreover, in justifying the tier rankings for these countries, State does not comprehensively describe foreign governments’ compliance with the standards, many of which are subjective. This lessens the report’s credibility and hampers its usefulness as a diplomatic tool. In addition, incomplete country narratives reduce the report’s utility as a guide to help focus U.S. government resources on antitrafficking programming priorities.

The GAO report is particularly critical of the State Department’s ranking methodology, which it found unacceptably political:

According to State officials, there are a considerable number of disagreements within State about the initial tier placements proposed by the Trafficking Office. These disagreements are not surprising, given that the Trafficking Office focuses exclusively on antitrafficking efforts while the Regional Bureaus manage bilateral relations, which comprise a wide range of issues. However, it is important that the process for resolving these conflicts be credible. Some disagreements on tier rankings are resolved in meetings between the Trafficking Office and the Deputy Assistant Secretaries of the Regional Bureaus, but most are elevated to the undersecretary level. A few disagreements are even referred to the Secretary of State for resolution. According to State officials, some disputes are worked out by clarifying misunderstandings or providing additional information. Although Trafficking Office staff said that these discussions are constructive, staff in State’s Regional Bureaus said that many disagreements over tier rankings are resolved by a process of “horsetrading,” whereby the Trafficking Office agrees to raise some countries’ tier rankings in exchange for lowering others. In these cases, political considerations may take precedence over a neutral assessment of foreign governments’ compliance with minimum standards to combat trafficking. Senior officials at the Trafficking Office acknowledged that political considerations sometimes come into play when making the tier ranking decisions.

The impact of those ranking problems was significant, according to the GAO, because it likely led to some countries being placed in the incorrect Tier. Some countries were arguably ranked too low:

Our review of country narratives in the 2005 report revealed some cases in which it was not clear how the situations used to justify the country’s inclusion in the report constituted severe forms of trafficking under U.S. law. For example, the country narratives for Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore described cases in which human smugglers abandoned people, domestic workers were abused by their employers, and foreign women engaged in prostitution. The narratives either did not clearly establish whether the situation involved victims of severe forms of trafficking or failed to provide enough information about the magnitude of the problem to convey the sense that the number of victims had reached 100 people. According to State officials, inclusion of human rights abuses or labor issues in the description of foreign countries’ human trafficking problem can damage the report’s credibility with foreign governments. Some State officials have suggested abandoning the threshold of 100 victims and including all countries in the report.

And others were arguably ranked too high:

For example, the 2005 report described France, a tier 1 country, as a destination for thousands of trafficked women and children. Although the report states that the French government fully complied with the minimum standards, our analysis of the narrative found that the first three standards were not mentioned. Furthermore, the narrative also discussed the French government’s failure to comply with the criterion on protecting trafficking victims, one of the key objectives of U.S. antitrafficking legislation. The narrative discusses a French law, which harmed trafficking victims by arresting, jailing, and fining them. Senior officials at the Trafficking Office are concerned about France’s lack of compliance with the victim protection criterion. The narrative, however, did not balance the discussion of these deficiencies by explaining how the government’s compliance with the other core criteria allowed it to meet the fourth minimum standard and thus be placed in tier 1.

The entire GAO report is available here.