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- State Department's human rights report prioritizes political goals over truth, group says</p>
<p>Abigail Williams August 13, 2025 at 5:00 PM</p>
<p>Inmates in their cell as Costa Rican Security Minister Gerald Campos tours the CECOT prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on April 4 during a visit organized by El Salvador's presidency. (Marvin Recinos / AFP via Getty Images file)</p>
<p>The Trump administration released its new, drastically scaled-down version of the State Department's annual human rights report after months of delay Tuesday. The administration's assessment of human rights abuses in some countries, which is one-tenth as long as last year's report, reaches notably different conclusions and dedicates no sections to abuses against women or LGBTQ people.</p>
<p>The report also places a new focus on restrictions of freedom of expression by U.S. adversaries and allies alike.</p>
<p>Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA's national director of government relations and advocacy, said the Trump administration had engaged in highly selective documentation of human rights abuses in certain countries.</p>
<p>"We have criticized past reports when warranted, but have never seen reports quite like this," Klasing said in a statement. "Never before have the reports gone this far in prioritizing an administration's political agenda over a consistent and truthful accounting of human rights violations around the world — softening criticism in some countries while ignoring violations in others."</p>
<p>State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce defended the administration's version of the report, which U.S. diplomats have compiled for nearly 50 years under a congressional mandate to measure countries' adherence to internationally recognized human rights.</p>
<p>"The Human Rights Report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancy, increases report readability, and is responsive to the legislative mandates that underpin the report, rather than an expansive list of politically biased demands and assertions," Bruce said. "Individual reports are more readable, objective, true to their statutory origins, and more useful than ever before."</p>
<p>Criticism of Europe</p>
<p>In the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other European countries, the Trump administration concluded that the human rights situation "worsened during the year." The report cited restrictions on freedom of expression, as well as reports of "crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by antisemitism."</p>
<p>In Germany, the report found "limits on the speech of groups it deemed extremist." In France, the State Department found "some limitations on freedom of speech." And the assessment listed restrictions on political speech in the U.K. it deemed "hateful" or "offensive."</p>
<p>The concerns were similar to those Vice President JD Vance expressed in a speech to the Munich Security Conference in February. Vance accused European Union leaders of suppressing free speech, particularly that off far-right groups.</p>
<p>Asked by reporters about the Trump administration's review of visa applicants' social media accounts, Bruce said: "We consider freedom of expression to be a foundational component of a functioning democracy. Societies are strengthened by free expression of opinion and government censorship is intolerable in a free society."</p>
<p>Support for Brazil's former president</p>
<p>The human rights situation also declined in Brazil last year, the Trump administration concluded, citing court rulings that it called "broad and disproportionate action to undermine freedom of speech and internet freedom."</p>
<p>"The government undermined democratic debate by restricting access to online content deemed to 'undermine democracy,' disproportionately suppressing the speech of supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro as well as journalists and elected politicians, often in secret proceedings that lacked due process guarantees," the report says.</p>
<p>Bolsonaro is currently on trial for allegedly plotting to assassinate his rivals to remain in office despite his loss in the 2022 election.</p>
<p>The report also criticizes Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has overseen Bolsonaro's court case, saying he "personally ordered the suspension of more than 100 user profiles on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), disproportionately suppressing the speech of advocates of former president Jair Bolsonaro."</p>
<p>Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently sanctioned de Moraes, revoking U.S. visas for him and members of his family.</p>
<p>Questioning a South African law</p>
<p>The report found the human rights situation had "significantly worsened" in South Africa, which Trump has repeatedly criticized since he returned to office. That was in sharp contrast with the State Department human rights report the Biden administration issued last year, which found no significant changes in human rights in South Africa.</p>
<p>The first group of Afrikaners from South Africa to arrive for resettlement after they arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va., on May 12. (Saul Loeb / AFP - Getty Images file)</p>
<p>The report called the Expropriation Act, a law that attempts to address the disparity in land ownership between white and Black South Africans, "a substantially worrying step towards land expropriation of Afrikaners and further abuses against racial minorities in the country."</p>
<p>The Trump administration has publicly decried the law, which allows the South African government to expropriate land — in some cases without compensation — in instances where it is unused or there is a public interest in its redistribution. Earlier this year, the administration resettled 59 white South Africans as refugees in the United States as it blocked refugee admissions from almost all other countries.</p>
<p>"The government did not take credible steps to investigate, prosecute, and punish officials who committed human rights abuses," the report said, "including inflammatory racial rhetoric against Afrikaners and other racial minorities, or violence against racial minorities."</p>
<p>No 'significant' abuses in El Salvador</p>
<p>The report said that in El Salvador, which imprisoned hundreds of migrants from the United States at the request of the Trump administration, there were "no credible reports of significant human rights abuses."</p>
<p>But several Venezuelan migrants who had been imprisoned in El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison told NBC News they had experienced physical and psychological torture. One man said he was sexually assaulted.</p>
<p>The Biden administration's human rights report on El Salvador last year was four times longer than the Trump administration's. It listed several significant human rights issues in the country, including credible reports of "unlawful or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces and harsh and life-threatening prison conditions."</p>
<p>The Trump administration's report also removed the section on Indigenous peoples and made no mention of elections or political participation in El Salvador.</p>
<p>Shorter passages on Israel, the West Bank and Gaza</p>
<p>The Trump administration's reports on Israel, the West Bank and Gaza were also dramatically shorter and had significantly less documentation of abuses by the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas than the Biden administration reports did last year.</p>
<p>Starving Palestinians, including women and children holding pots, wait to receive food distributed by a charity organization in Gaza City on Sunday. (Khames Alrefi / Anadolu via Getty Images)</p>
<p>In assessing Israel, the Trump administration cited reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings, enforced disappearance and degrading treatment of Palestinians by Israeli officials but emphasized that they resulted from the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas. The State Department's findings also concluded that the Israeli government "took several credible steps to identify officials who committed human rights abuses, with multiple trials pending at year's end."</p>
<p>The report listed significant human rights abuses by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, including "arbitrary or unlawful killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and trafficking in persons, including forced labor; and existence of the worst forms of child labor."</p>
<p>The report also included a detailed description of abuses by Hamas in Gaza, including, "unlawful killings, severe physical abuses and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment."</p>
<p>Regarding human rights abuses by Israeli security forces in the West Bank and Gaza, the report said simply that "there have been reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings; and serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom." But it again added that "Israeli authorities took steps to identify and punish officials or civilians accused of committing human rights abuses." And it did point out that human rights groups "frequently criticized authorities for not adequately pursuing investigations and disciplinary actions."</p>
<p>The report made no direct mention of the Israeli government's restrictions on humanitarian aid into Gaza or documented reports of starvation among some Palestinians this year. But it did highlight that in the West Bank, incidents of Israeli violence against Palestinians and their property reached their highest daily average figure since the United Nations started recording data in 2005.</p>
<p>War crimes allegations against Russia</p>
<p>The Trump administration's assessment of human rights in Russia is less than half as long as the same assessment in the Biden administration's report. Both reports cited allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and abuses by Russian forces and officials in the Russia-Ukraine war.</p>
<p>The assessment also pointed to human rights groups' concerns domestically, among them that Russian officials used new laws to punish dissent and limit independent expression. It did not dedicate a section to Russian government corruption as the Biden administration did.</p>
<p>The new report said that "Russia's occupation and purported annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and four oblasts in eastern Ukraine affected significantly and negatively the human rights situation there." It also described "credible reports of politically motivated arrests, detentions, and trials of Ukrainian citizens in Russia, many of whom claimed to have been tortured."</p>
<p>It also called the deportation of thousands of civilians to Russia, including children, a crime against humanity.</p>
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