The Trump Administration’s Subversion of the State Department’s Human Rights Reporting (Part 1)

[Jessica Zhu graduated with honors from Stanford University and is now a student at Stanford Law School, where she is executive editor of the Stanford Law Review.

Beth Van Schaack is a Distinguished Fellow with Stanford’s Center for Human Rights & International Justice and the former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice. She is a co-founder and principal with the Alliance for Diplomacy & Justice.]

This is a two-part post analyzing the degradation of the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights reports under U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Part 1 sets out the background on the annual reports and explains our methodology for comparing this year’s release to last year’s reports (published by the Biden-Harris administration) as well as to the reports issued under the first Trump administration. Part 2 will offer a comparative discussion of several exemplary reports with help from ChatGPT. 

Human Rights Day is upon us. Marked annually by moving events around the world, this day commemorates the United Nations’ proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on December 10, 1948. At the time, the horrors of World War II were still painfully fresh and inspired unprecedented cooperation as states rallied to draft international legal instruments to—borrowing from Justice Robert H. Jackson’s opening statement at Nuremberg—prevent and redress wrongs that were “so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” As a start, the imperative to protect and promote international human rights and fundamental freedoms was built into the founding document of the United Nations, but with little detail. As such, it was left to diplomats and civil society actors the responsibility of building the machinery necessary to protect and promote international human rights upon these toeholds in the U.N. Charter. 

Considered “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations,” the UDHR synthesized an array of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. In recognizing that the enjoyment of individual liberties depends upon an ethos of social responsibility, the UDHR took inspiration from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous “Four Freedoms” State of the Union speech, proclaiming the rights of all to enjoy freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The affinity between Roosevelt’s vision for a new world order and the deep structure of the UDHR is, of course, no mere coincidence. FDR’s widow Eleanor Roosevelt was later appointed by President Harry S. Truman to represent the United States before the United Nations. There, she chaired the new U.N. Human Rights Commission, which was mandated to draft an international bill of rights and gathered experts from all over the globe to canvas the world’s written constitutions, philosophical treatises, and religious texts who amassed the catalog of rights that eventually made up the UDHR. Although over 250 million people still lived under colonial subjugation at the time the UDHR was drafted, and Black Americans still lived under the oppression of Jim Crow, some of the most active, influential, and independent members of the Commission hailed from outside the West or represented vulnerable communities. Indeed, the stronger Western states, who guarded their sovereign prerogatives more jealously, were often in the minority in debates about how far the human rights project should reach.  

Given the United States’ proud legacy at the founding of the modern human rights movement, the Trump administration’s retreat from these commitments and its withdrawal from international legal frameworks like the U.N. Human Rights Council is all the more distressing and disgraceful. There is no better manifestation of this abject abdication than the human rights country reports released by the State Department this year under Secretary Marco Rubio’s leadership.   

The 2024 reports were originally drafted by human rights experts during the Biden-Harris administration but were subjected to extensive edits and erasures following Trump’s inauguration, a process that delayed their release for months. Comparisons to previous years’ reports (even from Trump I) reveal a dramatic exercise in retrenchment. While the State Department insisted that the reports would merely be “condensed”, our analysis found that they were gutted entirely. Moreover, they reveal an insidious manipulation of human rights rhetoric to advance the political priorities of the Trump administration. As Human Rights Watch has documented, “The administration has … grossly mischaracterized the human rights records of abusive governments with which it has or is currently seeking friendly relations.” Reporting on the state of international human rights is now not only deprioritized by the State Department, but also explicitly sacrificed or manipulated to serve other foreign policy objectives. As a result, the 2024 reports are little more than propaganda pieces, lacking in all credibility.  

The costs of this revisionism are very real: to the historical record, to asylum seekers and victims who would rely upon the reports to corroborate their claims, to academics and NGOs tracking human rights violations over time and across regions, to the advocates who courageously shared information—often at great personal risk—only to see their contributions ignored, and to U.S. credibility. Those who stand to benefit? Perpetrators who will be emboldened by the lack of scrutiny and censure. 

Background 

By way of background, the State Department has issued human rights country reports since 1977, when Congress amended the Foreign Assistance Act to require that the Secretary of State annually produce a “full and complete report” on the “status of internationally recognized human rights,” as recognized by the UDHR and other human rights instruments. Such reports are mandated for all United Nations member states, but they are particularly important for countries receiving U.S. foreign or security assistance who must, by law, adhere to human rights protections to remain eligible for U.S. aid. (CIVIC catalogues some of the relevant laws, such as Leahy and the Foreign Assistance Act, here). In addition to canvassing the state of human rights worldwide, the reports are to indicate “the extent to which the United States has taken or will take action to encourage an end to such practices.” 

The responsibility for producing the country reports is housed in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), which has been under assault by the Trump administration. Normally, DRL issues a data call to U.S. embassies and posts around the world to contribute updated information on the human rights situation in their host states. Human rights experts across the State Department would then help draft, inform, corroborate, and finalize the reports to ensure accuracy and credibility. (The office one of us used to lead, the Office of Global Criminal Justice, regularly contributed data on global justice issues within our remit.) Prior reports have been fact-heavy, containing detailed documentation of abuses with extensive citations to NGOs and media; statistics showing the extent and systematicity of abuses (e.g., on prison conditions and the number of disappearances and deaths in custody); individual case studies (e.g., specific incidents of torture and the names of political detainees); details on ongoing judicial proceedings (including abuse and corruption cases); and extensive reporting on press and NGO harassment. By statute, the country reports are supposed to be released on February 25; in practice, they are usually released later in the spring.

Over the years, the reports have expanded to include violations of women’s and workers rights, acts of antisemitism and other forms of racial and ethnic-based discrimination and violence, coercive population control measures, harms to refugees such as non-refoulement, and other categories of rights violations. These additions reflect both statutory updates and expanded priorities and understandings of human rights. The reports had become invaluable resources for legislators, academics, activists, and legal practitioners as credible and comprehensive accounts of the prevalence of human rights violations globally. Indeed, many longitudinal human rights, democracy, rule-of-law, and corruption indices have relied on the reports for corroboration and to track changes in the prevalence and scope of rights protections and violations across the globe. In the words of former Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights & Labor Mike Posner on these pages, DRL endeavored to maintain a strict separation between the vagaries of the United States’ bilateral policies and its human rights reporting and sought to “hold every government to a single standard and to maintain fidelity to the truth.”  

The Trump Administration’s Human Rights Reports 

No more. Earlier this year, leaked memoranda revealed that the Trump administration had ordered State Department staff to “streamline” the 2024 reports to cover only issues deemed statutorily required. The revised reports, which were finally released in August, eliminate or significantly truncate reporting on broad categories of rights—such as rights to political participation (including to assembly and speech), the right to be free from corruption, and the right to due process—as well as reporting on attacks against perennially vulnerable communities, including people of African descent, Indigenous people, Roma people, members of other marginalized racial and ethnic communities, workers, women and girls (including in Afghanistan), LGBTQI+ people, and refugees. 

As a result, the 2024 reports are a shadow of their former selves. They omit case studies, the naming of particular victims, statistics, and any deep narrative content. Corroborating sources—like reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, U.N. rapporteurs, and local NGOs—are also absent. Evaluative terms such as “systematic,” “widespread,” and “grossly unfair” appear roughly 70-80% less often as compared to last year’s reports, which is consistent with a broader pattern of toning down rights-respecting language.

The gutting of the 2024 reports has coincided with drastic changes that the Trump administration has made to the bureaucratic structure of DRL itself, which Rubio called “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendetta against ‘anti-woke’ leaders.” Many of the staff previously responsible for researching, drafting, and verifying the human rights reports were fired, and senior positions dedicated to human rights inside and outside of DRL were eliminated. Given staffing cuts and the fact that many of the United States’ local implementing partners have been defunded, it is unclear how these reports will be produced in the future, undermining the other statutory mandates that rely on them.

Methodology

To better understand the degradation of objective human rights reporting occasioned by the Trump administration’s approach, we deployed ChatGPT to compare reports from the first Trump administration, the Biden-Harris administration, and the current Trump administration across a range of variables and countries. Our starting prompt was: “Please compare these country reports and identify any significant differences in terms of organization, content, length, focus, and tone.” From there, we asked follow up questions requesting additional analysis of specific subject areas, such as: “Please compare the reports with a focus on how language about women and gender-based violence has changed.” We then confirmed the AI-generated results by reviewing the original reports themselves. We just picked a handful of countries but would recommend that others with an interest in particular situations conduct similar reviews of the various years’ reports with an eye toward identifying how the Trump administration is re-conceptualizing human rights elsewhere. 

This broad comparison reflects disturbing and dramatic alterations to which categories of rights violations are covered, which categories of victims are recognized, and which countries are or are not criticized. Incidentally, it also confirmed the limitations of machine-generated research, which has been reported elsewhere. On several occasions, ChatGPT hallucinated quotations and material from various reports in an effort to please us, even though we attempted to keep our queries as neutral as possible. 

Part 2 of this post will set forth a sample of our comparative results focused on: the disappearance or downgrading of several standard and long-established categories of rights violations (like violence against women and LGBTQI+ persons) and governmental corruption; the elevation of other claimed violations (such as uncorroborated discrimination against white Afrikaners); the soft touch given to allies of the Trump administration—such as the UAE, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, and El Salvador—and the “weaponization” of human rights rhetoric against diplomatic adversaries; and the general disappearance of any serious discussion of international law or institutions.  

Photo attribution: “Ceiling of the Human Rights Council” by United States Mission Geneva is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0