The U.S. State Department on Tuesday released its annual report intended to catalog human rights concerns around the world—and, in a departure from previous years, it skipped entire swaths of abuses in some cases.
“In the latest edition, many specific sections from earlier reports were removed, including discussions of alleged human rights violations based on sexual orientation, violence against women, government corruption, systemic racist or ethnic violence, or the denial of a fair public trial,” CNN summarizes. “Some country reports, including Afghanistan, address human rights violations against women.”
The report covers the year 2024 and was largely completed before the Trump administration took office, but was subsequently revised in significant ways. “In some countries, such as El Salvador, which are political allies of the Trump administration, there was noticeably less criticism and fewer details about human rights abuses,” CNN notes. Instead, in traditionally allied countries like Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, an alleged deterioration in the human rights situation was recorded.
Germany in the Trump administration’s view
Concerning Germany, the current report flags “restrictions on freedom of expression”—for example raids against hate speech circulated on social media—and the document also cites reports of crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by anti-Semitism, as outlined in the introduction.
In the previous Germany report for 2023, the introduction stated that there were no major changes in the overall human rights situation. Yet several issues were identified: the report referenced violent crimes against members of ethnic and religious groups, including Muslims; anti-Semitism was noted; and violence or threats against queer people were also mentioned.
Criticism of Germany had already been voiced by the current U.S. administration under President Donald Trump months earlier. In February, Vice President JD Vance, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, accused European allies of constraining freedom of speech and jeopardizing democracy. He criticized, among other things, the exclusion of the AfD and BSW from the summit.
Queer-Phobic Policy Ignored
A senior State Department spokesperson told CNN that the U.S. policy to promote respect for human rights worldwide—or in a given country—has not changed. While, for instance, the 2023 Hungary report identifies anti-queer legislation as a worsening of the human rights situation, the Trump administration’s report omits the issue entirely. The same omission applies to Russia, which advocates queer-hostility at home and abroad (2023, 2024). The report’s introduction to Saudi Arabia (2023, 2024)—an authoritarian regime with strong government and private ties to Trump—documents various human rights abuses but does not address the suppression of queer people in a state that still imposes the death penalty for homosexual acts.
According to CNN, in many countries entire passages from previous years about grave human rights violations were removed. “We were asked to trim the human rights reports to the legally mandated minimum,” said Michael Honigstein, the former director for Africa affairs in the Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which produces large portions of the report. Many staffers were laid off last month, CNN reports. The new administration’s focus is now on “promoting the positive vision of the government regarding American and Western values.”
