Anne Applebaum writes:

For nearly half a century, the State Department has reported annually on human-rights conditions in countries around the world. The purpose of this exercise is not to cast aspersions, but to collect and disseminate reliable information. Congress mandated the reports back in 1977, and since then, legislators and diplomats have used them to shape decisions about sanctions, foreign aid, immigration, and political asylum.

Because the reports were perceived as relatively impartial, because they tried to reflect well-articulated standards—“internationally recognized individual, civil, political, and worker rights, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”—and because they were composed by professionals reporting from the ground, the annual documents became a gold standard, widely used by people around the world, cited in court cases and political campaigns. Year in and year out, one former official told me, they have been the most downloaded items on the State Department website.

Quite a few people will also read the 2024 reports, published yesterday. But they will do so for very different reasons. The original drafts were ready in January, before the Biden administration left office, following the usual practice. In past years, the reports were published in March or April. But this year they were delayed for several months while President Donald Trump’s political appointees, including Michael Anton, the MAGA intellectual who is now the State Department’s director of policy planning, rewrote the drafts.

Some of the changes affect the whole collection of documents, as entire categories of interest were removed. The Obama administration had previously put a strong focus on corruption, on the grounds that kleptocracy and autocracy are deeply linked, and it started collecting information on the persecution of sexual minorities. Over the past few weeks, as the new reports were being prepared, I spoke with former officials who had seen early versions, or who had worked on the reports in the past. As many of them expected, the latest reports do not address systemic discrimination against gay or trans people, and they remove observations about rape and violence against women.

But the revisions also go much further than expected, dropping references to corruption, restrictions on free and fair elections, rights to a fair trial, and the harassment of human-rights organizations. Threats to freedom of assembly are no longer considered sufficiently important to mention. In a number of instances, criticism of Israel is classified, crudely, as “antisemitism.” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s use of the word genocide to describe the war in Gaza, for example, is listed as an act of “antisemitism and antisemitic incitement,” even though that term, however disputable or controversial, has also been used by Israelis and in any case violates no international human-rights norms at all. [Continue reading…]