State Dept. human rights reports scale back criticism of El Salvador, but fault U.K., Germany

The State Department on Tuesday released a long-awaited series of reports on worldwide human rights practices that reveal scaled-back criticism of select countries including El Salvador and harsher assessments of traditional U.S. allies, including the United Kingdom and Germany. 

The release follows a period of revisions that administration officials said were meant to “streamline” the reports, which cover events in about 200 countries in 2024 and had been largely completed by the end of the Biden administration. A note included with the reports said they had been “adjusted” to be “aligned to the administration’s executive orders.” 

The 2024 reports omit references to LGBTQ discrimination issues and significantly pare back treatments of issues including gender-based violence and government corruption. They no longer include sections dedicated to systemic racial or ethnic discrimination or violence, or to child abuse or child sexual exploitation, among other deletions.

Mandated by Congress, the reports have been produced annually by the State Department for decades and are used by U.S. policymakers, human rights workers, foreign governments and judicial bodies worldwide as a resource to inform potential arms sales and court proceedings, and they also function as a U.S.-led check on government corruption and abuses. 

Rights groups and former State Department officials decried the revisions as an “erasure” of the plight of marginalized communities and what they said was a politically motivated move that undermined the prior value of the reports. 

“I think the signals are quite loud and quite clear of who they value and who they don’t,” said Desirée Cormier Smith, former special representative for racial equity and justice, now with the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice.

In the case of El Salvador, which ended presidential term limits in early August and has an agreement with the Trump administration to accept and detain undocumented immigrants from the U.S., the report notes “There were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” and that the government had taken “credible steps to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses.” 

The 2023 report made note of El Salvador’s overcrowded prisons and reports of “arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention,” and more. 

This year’s report for Hungary notes “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” though last year’s included extensive mention of “serious government corruption” and restrictions on media freedom.  

Meanwhile the 2024 report for the United Kingdom notes the “human rights situation worsened,” citing “credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including enforcement of or threat of criminal or civil laws in order to limit expression; and crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by antisemitism.” A similar assessment was offered for Germany and France, countries administration officials including Vice President JD Vance have publicly accused of censorship and the suppression of free speech.

Asked by a reporter how the Trump administration squares its stricter monitoring of free expression via social media accounts of U.S. visa applicants with its criticism of European countries restricting hate speech, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a press briefing Tuesday that “restrictive laws against dis-favored voices, often on political or religious grounds — no matter how disagreeable someone’s speech may be — to criminalize it, or silencing it by force only serves as a catalyst for further hatred, suppression, and polarization.”

The 2024 report for Israel, the West Bank and Gaza does not include a death toll for Israelis or Palestinians since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, a figure that was included in 2023.  

The report acknowledged a Committee to Protect Journalists figure of 82 Palestinian journalists having been killed in the conflict last year, but also included a line saying that “[i]n some cases, the IDF claimed the journalists killed were embedded with Hamas terrorists.” 

The report did acknowledge troubling human rights records in several countries with which it has struck agreements to deport third national nationals, such as Libya. It noted credible reports of “arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest and detention” and other abuses.

It also noted of Afghanistan that there was “widespread disregard for the rule of law and official impunity for those responsible for human rights abuses.” The U.S. terminated temporary protected status for Afghans last month, leaving more than 12,000 vulnerable to deportation. 

Reports for Russia, China, North Korea and Iran noted this year, as they did in previous years, “significant” human rights issues and included criticism of inaction by their respective governments to identify or punish those who had committed abuses.

“The 2024 human rights report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancies, increases report readability and is more responsive to the legislative mandates that underpin the report,” a senior State Department official said in a briefing last week. “U.S. policy on promoting respect for human rights around the globe, or in any particular country, has not changed.”

James LaPorta

contributed to this report.