The New Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
The United States has been publishing reports on human rights practices in other countries since 1977. Initially, only countries receiving foreign U.S. assistance were covered. Today, all countries are.
The reports grew and grew in length, and when I served as assistant secretary of state for human rights (1982-1985) the annual volume was immense—over 1500 pages, thick and heavy. (Nowadays it is not printed, due to easy availability on the internet.) It also became unbalanced in many ways over the years, sometimes heavy on “rights” an incumbent administration favored (such as the Biden administration’s emphasis on LGBT rights) and sometimes devoting excessive attention to one country or another, and always to Israel. Thus we were often faced with State Department drafts about the worst human rights violators in the Soviet camp that were shorter than the report on Israel and the “occupied territories.”
The reports for 2024 were issued recently by the State Department and there is good news and bad.
The good news is that the reports remain generally honest, even about U.S. allies. The test of the reports has never been how sharply they attack U.S. enemies; that’s easy. It was always how friendly dictatorships and authoritarian or totalitarian systems are treated. Here are some examples (taken from the executive summaries in the report) of why I say “generally honest.”
Saudi Arabia:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest and detention; transnational repression against individuals in another country; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists and censorship; restrictions of religious freedom; and prohibiting independent trade unions or significant or systemic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association.
The government did not take credible steps or action to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses in a verifiable way.
Egypt:
Egypt’s human rights situation remained concerning. The government took steps to address human rights concerns during the year, including closing investigations into rights groups in Case 173 (known as the “Foreign Funding Case”), but in most cases, authorities did not comprehensively investigate or prosecute allegations of human rights abuses, including most incidents of violence by security forces.
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest and detention; instances of transnational repression against individuals in another country; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists and censorship; significant restrictions on workers’ freedom of association; and significant presence of some of the worst forms of child labor.
The government’s lack of investigations and prosecutions into allegations of human rights abuses contributed to an environment of impunity.
Uganda:
There were negative developments in the human rights situation in Uganda during the year.
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest or detention; transnational repression against individuals in another country; unlawful recruitment or use of children in armed conflict by nonstate armed groups; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including violence or threats of violence against journalists, and censorship; and significant presence of any of the worst forms of child labor.
The government did not take credible steps or action to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses.
India:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest or detention; transnational repression against individuals in another country; serious abuses in a conflict; unlawful recruitment or use of children in armed conflict by Maoist nonstate groups; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including violence or threats of violence against journalists, unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists, and censorship; and instances of coerced abortion or forced sterilization.
The government took minimal credible steps or action to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses.
On the other hand, consider El Salvador—whose government under President Bukele has become a close ally of the Trump administration. The State Department report is a whitewash, saying this:
There were no significant changes in the human rights situation in El Salvador during the year. Reports of gang violence remained at a historic low under the state of exception as mass arrests suppressed gang activity. There were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses. The government took credible steps to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses.
Now compare what the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said in its report on “El Salvador: State of Emergency and Human Rights:”
[T]he IACHR interviewed individuals and heard allegations of human rights violations perpetrated by the security forces, including: systematic and widespread, illegal and arbitrary detentions, illegal searches of homes, abuses in the use of force [and] violations of the rights of children and adolescents. In addition, it received information on specific challenges in access to justice posed by detentions and their implications for the guaranteeing of the rights of Salvadoran individuals to judicial guarantees and judicial protection, which include, inter alia: delay in judicial oversight of detentions, the ineffectiveness of the habeas corpus recourse, the lack of evidence to support the charges brought, abuses in the imposition of pre-trial detention, the holding of judicial mass hearings, restrictions on the exercise of the right to defense and judicial guarantees, and disrespect for due process of law.
And here is the “Overview” of human rights in El Salvador in the Freedom House 2025 report:
Widespread corruption undermines democracy and the rule of law, while the executive has concentrated control over the legislature, judiciary, and oversight institutions. Authorities maintain a harsh, militarized response to public security, resulting in extrajudicial killings, mass arbitrary arrests, and other abuses. Members of the active civil society sector and dynamic press risk harassment and violence in connection with their coverage of organized crime, corruption, and criticism of government policy.
This is a clear example where a report reflects administration policies, not actual human rights conditions on the ground.
This year’s State Department reports have rightly been criticized on those grounds, but criticism about the reports’ length seems to me unwarranted. There is no ideal length, and no reason why State Department reports must always be as long as or much longer than those of NGOs.
In an appendix to the report this year, State says two things of note. First, it explains that “This year’s reports were streamlined for better utility and accessibility in the field and by partners, and to be more responsive to the underlying legislative mandate and aligned to the administration’s executive orders. We minimize the amount of statistical data in the report. In the age of the internet, the underlying data are generally available.” Second, the appendix notes that “The executive summary of each report is sharply focused on credible reports of significant abuses of internationally recognized human rights. These include, for example, reports of extrajudicial killing, torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and evidence of acts that may constitute genocide.” I see no reason for criticism of either of these adjustments.
Instead, two things count more: candor, and top-level administration support.
The latter point is where the Trump administration truly deserves the criticism. This year’s report, obviously the first in the second Trump administration and the first for Secretary of State Rubio, was buried. Rubio did not introduce the report. The 2019 report begins with a preface from Secretary of State Pompeo; this year there is no preface from Rubio, nor did he hold a press conference to announce the report or do anything at all to suggest that he viewed the report or human rights policy more generally as being of any significance.
This severely undermines U.S. human rights policy. As I wrote last year, “Promoting democracy does not work as a bureaucratic project. Either it comes from the top—the president and secretary of state—or dictators and democracy activists soon see there is no muscle behind it. That means that speeches are not enough. There are almost always difficult choices between democracy goals and other U.S. interests: financial, economic, commercial, or security. If democracy always comes last, the message is clear.”
And very unfortunately, that does seem to be the administration’s message—not only in ignoring its own report, but in the nature of the cuts to the human rights bureau at State. The administration argues that the efficacy of human rights work in the Department can be enhanced by moving human rights officers from one central human rights bureau into the regional bureaus. From my experience, that is extremely doubtful—but also beside the point. If the secretary of state and the president show that they are concerned about human rights issues, almost any bureaucratic arrangements can be made to work. If they do not, having a human rights bureau does not accomplish much.
The Country Reports serve several purposes. One is to force our embassies to pay attention to human rights issues because they will need to compile the first draft of the annual report and submit it to the Department. How much attention they pay, however, will vary with their sense of whether the top officials of the administration care about these matters. Given the way the human rights bureau and this year’s report is being treated, the message to ambassadors is clearly that human rights matters just don’t count for much nowadays in the White House and on the seventh floor of the State Department.
Another purpose of the Country Reports is very simply to tell the truth. Congress required these reports in the hope that U.S. foreign policy would to some degree reflect the truths reported annually about human rights abuses. Many truths are told in this year’s report, but the administration seems to be intent on burying them.
Over to Congress, then. Both the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should hold hearings on the report and on human rights policy more generally (including what has been done to the human rights bureau), and demand that Secretary Rubio testify. Human rights issues were often in the past championed by Congress, and indeed some of the initial energy and legislation was a reaction to perceived indifference to human rights by President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger. Unlike Kissinger, Rubio has a long record (in the Senate) as a champion of human rights. Those would be interesting and worthwhile hearings—not as a partisan occasion to attack the administration, but (one can always hope) as an occasion where a serious discussion of the dilemmas, the importance, the organizational issues, and the future of U.S. support for human rights can be discussed.
