The administration of President Donald Trump is scaling back criticism of certain foreign governments over their human rights records, including their treatment of LGBTQ+ people, in a shift from the traditional U.S. promotion of rights, The Washington Post reported.
The newspaper reviewed leaked draft reports on El Salvador, Israel and Russia being prepared for the State Department’s annual report on human rights practices in countries around the world.
Newsweek reached out to the State Department for comment Wednesday night.
Why It Matters
The leaked reports for the three countries underscore how the Trump administration is rethinking the U.S. role in global human rights advocacy.
The apparent shift on human rights reflects a pattern of disengagement from international conventions and comes as the administration has already moved to abandon long-held positions and norms in areas like trade, the environment and relations with allies.
Diplomats in U.S. embassies around the world have drawn up the annual rights report for almost 50 years. Their findings are considered the most thorough and wide-ranging of their kind.
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
What To Know
The Post said the documents it reviewed are consistent with internal guidance circulated this year by State Department leaders who advised staff to shorten the reports to the minimum required by statutory guidelines and executive orders and to remove references to government corruption, gender-based crimes and other abuses the U.S. government historically has documented.
“The 2024 Human Rights report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancies, increases report readability and is more responsive to the legislative mandate that underpins the report,” the newspaper cited a senior State Department official as saying.
According to the Post, the reports it reviewed are significantly shorter than the ones prepared last year by the administration of former President Joe Biden. They cut all references to LGBTQ+ people or crimes against them, and the descriptions of government abuses that remain have been softened.
The draft for El Salvador says it had “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” in 2024. The previous report for El Salvador, documenting 2023, identified “significant human rights issues” there—including government-sanctioned killings, instances of torture and “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”
“A comparison of the documents covering El Salvador shows the Trump administration downplaying the country’s history of prison violence, emphasizing that there has been a reduction overall while stating that purported deaths were under government review,” the newspaper reported.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, a close ally of Trump, has offered to house people from other countries deported by the U.S. in a mega-prison built to detain gang members.
“Scrutiny of corruption and judicial independence also is significantly scaled back in the draft report for Israel,” the newspaper said, adding that the Israel draft is 25 pages compared with more than 100 pages last year.
The draft for Israel makes no mention of corruption or threats to the independence of its judiciary. The 2023 report compiled by the Biden administration addresses the corruption trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and judicial overhaul efforts, which critics say threaten the independence of the judiciary.
Previous reports also mentioned Israeli surveillance of Palestinians and restrictions of their movement but the issue is not addressed in the draft, the Post said.
Keifer Buckingham, who worked on LGBTQ+ issues at the State Department until January, told the Post that the failure to include any mention in the reviewed reports of gender-based violence or violence against LGBTQ+ people was a “glaring omission” in the case of Russia, where its Supreme Court had banned LGBTQ+ organizations and labeled them “extremist,” with raids and arrests last year.
What People Are Saying
Buckingham, also managing director at The Council for Global Equality, said: “Secretary (of State Marco) Rubio has repeatedly asserted that his State Department has not abandoned human rights, but it is clear by this and other actions that this administration only cares about the human rights of some people…in some countries, when it’s convenient to them.”
The senior State Department official cited by the newspaper said: “The human rights report focuses on core issues.”
What Happens Next
It is not clear if the reports eventually transmitted to Congress and released to the public will mirror the drafts. The ones for El Salvador and Russia are marked “finalized,” while the draft for Israel is marked “quality check,” the Post reported.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
