The Trump Administration’s Subversion of the State Department’s Human Rights Reporting (Part 2)

[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 offered some background on the annual reports; explained our use of ChatGPT to compare 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; and identified what is at stake with the dramatic downgrading of what was once an important tool for human rights documentation and analysis. Part 2, below, offers a comparative discussion of several exemplary reports with help from ChatGPT.

With help from ChatGPT, we analyzed the annual reports from several key countries to compare how the human rights situation was described under Trump I, during the Biden-Harris administration, and under the current Trump administration. This half of the post sets forth below a sample of our comparative results focused on several categories of rights violations and victim communities as well as the overall tone and sources of authority cited. 

First, standard and long-established categories of rights violations—like violence against women and LGBTQ+ communities, government corruption, and harassment of human rights organizations—were omitted entirely or curtailed. 

Across country reports released this year, there was a marked, and in some cases complete, erasure of any mention of women’s and LGBTQI+ rights. For example, around ten percent of the 2023 United Arab Emirates report was dedicated to discussion of women’s rights alone, including legal and economic discrimination, low enforcement of laws against rape, and discriminatory marriage laws. That entire section was eliminated in the 2024 report, leaving only the absolute statutory minimum of one sentence stating that there were “no reports of coerced abortion or involuntary sterilization.” Similarly, while the 2023 report critiqued laws criminalizing same-sex sexual conduct and so-called “cross-dressing”, mentions of discrimination against LGBTQI+ communities were omitted from the 2024 report. 

These types of changes were characteristic across virtually all countries. Another notable example is Hungary. The Trump administration has long been an ally of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and both leaders have echoed nationalist rhetoric against migrants and LGBTQI+ communities. The 2024 report’s disregard of the Hungarian government’s escalating attacks on democratic institutions, independent media, LGBTQ+ communities, and migrants reflects an ideological congruence, as well as a willingness to disregard severe rights violations as political favors for strategic allies. The 2024 report omitted all discussion of the “child protection” law, which restricts minors’ access to LGBTQI+ content and imposes fines on bookstores that do not plastic-wrap such books. Also absent this year but covered by previous reports was Orbán’s “No Migration, No Gender, No War” campaign, a slogan he has repeated often to incite populist sentiment against migrants and LGBTQI+ persons. 

Similarly, the report released this year on El Salvador omitted any serious discussion of the severe violence against women and LGBTQI+ persons that has been extensively documented by the media, U.S. agencies, and NGOs. It mentions violence against women only once, in a police complaint tally: “As of August 16, the PNC registered 23 complaints of sexual abuse, 19 complaints of violence against women, and four complaints of abuse of children allegedly committed by police.” Violence and discrimination against LGBTQI+ persons was not acknowledged at all. 

This marks a significant change from the 2023 report on El Salvador, which noted that ORMUSA, a domestic women’s rights organization, registered 26 femicides between January and May 31, 2023; that COMCAVIS TRANS, a domestic NGO promoting LGBTQI+ rights, found that 43 percent of transgender women had faced issues with law enforcement; and that 39 percent of LGBTQI+ individuals surveyed were unemployed, compared with 5 percent of the general population. The 2023 report also included wider discussion of legal reforms, enforcement gaps, and systemic issues, such as national laws on femicide and sexual harassment; reproductive rights (including a total abortion ban and cases of prosecutions for “feticide”); discrimination against transgender persons in health care, banking, and voting; and the unavailability of legal gender recognition. 

One final example is Saudi Arabia, a key Trump ally that is being courted heavily to join the Abraham Accords. The 2023 report documented poor conditions in women’s detention facilities, including sexual harassment; the names of specific women’s rights activists and the outcomes of their trials; the deleterious impact of male guardianship laws; legal barriers related to domestic violence and sexual assault; wage discrimination; the persistence of child marriage and enforcement issues; and the prevalence of female genital mutilation/cutting. These issues were all absent or greatly reduced this year.

Across the 2024 country reports, these once-standard topics were essentially collapsed into a few lines under the general “Security of the Person” heading and stripped of any real analysis. The gutting of these central categories of rights violations is of course deeply concerning—but even more troubling are the issues the Trump administration has chosen to elevate instead. 

Second, the focus has shifted to political priorities of the Trump administration, such as violence against white Afrikaners in South Africa and antisemitism. 

One clear new focal point is South Africa, which Trump has repeatedly accused of committing a “white genocide.” Central to the 2024 report is an obsession with (uncorroborated) land expropriation and anti-Afrikaner discrimination. The executive summary begins with the unfounded conclusion that the “human rights situation in South Africa significantly worsened during the year.” Language dedicated to identifying repression against “minority” groups (previously used inclusively to refer to victims of xenophobic violence and the majority Black South African population), refugees, LGBTQ+ persons and other groups, now refers exclusively to white Afrikaners. That repeated emphasis on Afrikaner victimization and anti-white violence echoes far-right, nationalist talking points that the Trump administration has amplified both domestically and abroad. It is also consistent with the Trump administration’s refugee policy, which by executive order will cut refugee admissions to 7,500 and prioritize Afrikaners.

Another salient example is Israel, where misrepresentative and selective reporting was clearly intended to further the Trump administration’s approach to the war in Gaza. The 103 pages released in 2023 were reduced to just nine pages in 2024, with entire sections on threats to judicial independence, Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the unlawful expansion of settlements, and harsh detention of political prisoners all eliminated. 

The work of domestic and international NGOs was extensively featured in, and cited by, the 2023 report, which noted that human rights organizations “raised concerns over reports of systemic torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment of Palestinian detainees.” Among those cited were the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), which reported an increase in Israeli security agency Shin Bet’s use of “exceptional measures,” including torture; Ma’avarim – Israeli Trans Community, which reported that transgender women were held in solitary confinement; and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), which filed a petition to the Supreme Court presenting detainees’ testimonies on being held for days without access to toilets, proper food, or medical services. 

The report on Israel this year, in contrast, reduces all discussion of violence against detainees to just two sentences. First: “According to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), at least 43 Palestinians died in Israeli custody during the year.” Eliminating mention of all NGO documentation of detention conditions, the report later adds that: “The government acknowledged Shin Bet (the Israel Security Agency) and police used violent interrogation methods that it referred to as ‘exceptional measures,’ but the Ministry of Justice did not provide information regarding the frequency of interrogations or the specific interrogation methods used.”

Most strikingly, the 2024 report is completely silent on the civilian casualties of the war in Gaza despite United Nations reports that over 45,000 people, including 14,500 children, were killed in Gaza between October 2023 and mid-December 2024. Also missing were credible NGO reports documenting that almost 84 percent of health facilities were destroyed or damaged; that Israeli authorities’ denial of adequate water needed for survival contributed to a public health disaster; that the Israeli blockade denied 83 percent of food aid entry into Gaza as of September 2023, then blocked all food aid to northern Gaza in October; that famine was imminent in northern Gaza; and that at least 318 aid workers were killed in Gaza between October 2023 and October 2024, the highest ever in a single crisis. 

Though discussion of antisemitism abroad is also less fulsome than in previous years’ reporting, it is one of the few categories of rights violations still explicitly detailed in the 2024 reports. The resulting centrality of antisemitism across the country reports mirrors the Trump administration’s manipulation of the very real problem of antisemitism to weaken independent institutions (such as universities) and justify restrictions on the expression of other civil rights and liberties (e.g., to speech or to assembly), particularly when it involves criticism of Israel. For example, the 2023 report on France presented a pluralist view of how the state’s secularism policy (laïcité) negatively impacted all religious communities, particularly Muslims and Jews. That discussion was revised this year to focus only on antisemitism, with no mention of Islamophobic discrimination or anti-Muslim effects. 

Even the reporting on antisemitism, however, was significantly pared down and less detailed than in years past. For example, while the administration claims to prioritize the fight against antisemitism, evidence of this scourge in Hungary was eliminated. The 2023 report underscored examples of antisemitism and cited a regional Budapest survey finding that 49 percent of respondents could be classified as moderately or strongly antisemitic; by contrast, the 2024 report claimed that Orban has “made combating antisemitism a top priority, publicly emphasizing its welcoming and open environment for Jews”—a view not shared by other human rights organizations. 

This selective reporting of certain rights violations is only expected to worsen in the coming years. Under a November 2025 State Department order, the reports will henceforth consider Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Accessibility (DEIA) programs; financial assistance for the exercise of reproductive rights or gender-affirming care; and hate speech (including internet safety laws) to be “human rights violations”. These new guidelines expand the Trump administration’s domestic agenda into its foreign policy and will surely have harmful consequences for the exercise of such rights abroad. 

Third, the reports are noticeably friendlier to countries the Trump administration is pursuing diplomatic initiatives with, such as the UAE, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, and El Salvador.

The tonal differences between the 2023 and 2024 reports on several countries are quite jarring. The 2023 report on Hungary opens with the dire warning that the “human rights situation in Hungary deteriorated during the year” and went on to identify a number of “significant human rights issues.” The executive summary this year, on the other hand, states that there were “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” and that the government “took credible steps” to punish abusers. This broad exoneration is belied by extensive reporting by other reputable human rights organizations.

El Salvador, where the Trump administration has been deporting immigrants from the United States, also received a markedly friendlier (and 75% shorter) report than last year, particularly with regard to the country’s massive and abusive carceral system. Notably, extensive detail on prison overcrowding, food and water shortages, medical neglect, and specific detainee deaths were omitted from the 2024 report—despite heightened scrutiny by others of the massive Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), which houses hundreds of Trump administration deportees and has been the subject of extensive human rights reporting. 

Abuses related to President Nayib Bukele’s brutal state of exception, which has suspended basic constitutional rights since March 2022 against the urging of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, were also omitted. While the 2023 report documented arbitrary detentions, deaths in custody, torture, and violations of due process, the 2024 report framed the state of exception as a security success story—stating that “gang violence remained at a historic low” and that there were “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses.” This patently false language shelters Bukele from criticism, protecting a key White House ally in the Trump administration’s rapid escalation of deportations. 

The 2023 report also discusses ongoing civil war-era human rights cases, such as those concerning death squad activity and the 1981 El Mozote massacre. With respect to the latter, the report noted that the court was still hearing witness testimony, but that expert witnesses had been denied access to military archives in violation of a 2020 judicial order. The 2024 report is entirely silent as to these important exercises in transitional justice.

Fourth, there is a sharp decline in invocations of international law and international organizations, except where beneficial to the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities. 

The Trump administration has been explicit about adopting an isolationist approach to certain foreign policy issues and expressing its disdain for international law and organizations. The 2024 human rights reports largely confirm that sentiment. But violations of international law were also—often appropriately—identified at the hands of political adversaries like Russia, China, and Hamas, indicating that the administration still views the lexicon of international law and human rights to be useful when levied strategically against adversaries to achieve foreign policy goals. 

Previous reports had broadly invoked international human rights treaties and the outputs of human rights mechanisms and expert bodies as an evaluative yardstick to measure states’ compliance with their human rights obligations. Citations to the European Court of Justice, European Court of Human Rights, Convention Against Torture, U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Geneva Conventions, International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights, Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, and other agreements or bodies have been common across past reports. The 2023 report on Israel, for example, stated that the United Nations and human rights groups have called demolition orders of Arab- and Palestinian-owned structures a form of collective punishment violating the Fourth Geneva Convention. 

But across all country reports this year, domestic legal frameworks were largely relied upon instead to measure rights violations. Rather than making reference to internationally-recognized standards, the 2024 reports stated only that authorities acted under or violated national law. 

There were some exceptions, however: The report on Russia documented crimes against humanity committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, and the report on China concentrated largely on the genocide and crimes against humanity committed against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious groups in Xinjiang. These sections remained largely consistent with previous years, though the 2024 reports are much shorter. Additionally, the report on Israel stated that “Hamas and Hizballah continue to engage in the indiscriminate targeting of Israeli civilians in violation of the law of armed conflict,” though it had no equivalent discussion of similar violations by Israeli forces in Gaza or other rights violations in Israel or the West Bank. 

To be fair, the 2023 report released during the Biden-Harris administration also omitted fulsome reporting on Israeli violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza. But the 2024 report’s omissions were even more troubling in light of the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 order that Israel take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide—and Israel’s clear defiance of that order. The 2024 report also ignored new findings by international legal bodies, like the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Reporting by NGOs on war crimes and crimes against humanity, including apartheid and forced displacement, was also missing.

Conclusion

These are just some particularly prominent examples of the 2024 human rights reports’ drastically reduced evaluations of states’ international human rights records. While silent on many widely-documented violations of international criminal and humanitarian law by political allies, the administration has weaponized the terminology of international law against its adversaries, feeding into perennial critiques of selective justice. 

These changes are striking not only when compared to Biden-era and prior reports, but also when compared to those produced during Trump’s first presidential term. References to international law are much sparser than they were even in 2019, when the reports still used multilateral bodies and agreements as evaluative frameworks and sources of international norms. The first Trump administration also employed the classic DRL organization of distinct categories of rights violations, rather than the skeletal outline that the State Department implemented for the 2024 reports. 

The flagrant and ideological changes that the Trump administration has made to the State Department’s human rights reports are not just about losing a credible source of information on human rights conditions around the world. They are also indicative of the administration’s broader willingness to flout custom and longstanding practice and manipulate reality in order to serve its own political goals. In the words of the Alliance for Diplomacy & Justice: 

The delay in the release of the reports had one purpose: to rewrite history. But the abuses of 2024 happened. Erasing them from the record will not erase the survivors or their suffering. It will only make justice harder to achieve—and injustices more likely to be repeated.

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