The Trump administration on Tuesday released human rights reports for countries worldwide that eliminate mentions of discrimination faced by LGBTQ2 people, reduce a previous focus on reproductive rights and criticize restrictions on political speech by U.S. allies in Europe that American officials believe target right-wing politicians.
The reports, which cover 2024 before President Donald Trump took office, reflect his administration’s focus on free speech and restricting access to abortion.
However, the reports also offer a glimpse into the administration’s view of dire human rights conditions in some countries that have agreed to accept migrants deported from the United States under Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“This year’s reports were streamlined for better utility and accessibility in the field and by partners,” the U.S. State Department said.
The congressionally mandated reports in the past have been frequently used for reference and cited by lawmakers, policymakers, academic researchers and others investigating potential asylum claims or looking into conditions in specific countries.
The reports had been due to be released in March.
The State Department said in an overview that the delay occurred because the Trump administration decided in March to “adjust” the reports, which had been compiled during the Biden administration.
Among other deletions, the reports do not include accounts from individual abuse survivors or witnesses.
“Frequently, eyewitnesses are intimidated or prevented from reporting what they know,” the overview said.
“On the other hand, individuals and groups opposed to a government may have incentive to exaggerate or fabricate abuses. In similar fashion, some governments may distort or exaggerate abuses attributed to opposition groups.”
Human rights groups decried the changes in focus and omissions of certain categories of discrimination and potential abuse.
“With the release of the U.S. State Department’s human rights report, it is clear that the Trump Administration has engaged in a very selective documentation of human rights abuses in certain countries,” Amnesty International said in a statement.
“In addition to eliminating entire sections for certain countries – for example discrimination against LGBTQ+ people – there are also arbitrary omissions within existing sections of the report based on the country,” it said.
The reports do follow previous practices in criticizing widespread human rights abuses in China, Iran, North Korea and Russia.
The report on Russia, as well as a separate one on Russia-occupied areas of Ukraine, go much further in documenting its abuses in Ukraine — including acknowledging accusations of war crimes — than Trump or U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio have done in public.
It says Moscow “did not take credible steps or action to identify and punish most officials who committed human rights abuses.”
The Ukraine report admonishes the Ukrainian government of curtailing freedoms of the press and expression, though it notes many of the measures are due to martial law imposed during wartime.
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The report’s section on Israel was much shorter than last year’s edition and contained no mention of the severe humanitarian crisis or death toll in Gaza.
What does it say about NATO allies?
The reports take issue with what the Trump administration believes are restrictions on free speech imposed against generally right-wing voices in the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
The reports use identical language to say that human rights conditions in each of the three NATO allies “worsened during the year.”
The executive summaries for each of the three reports say “significant human rights issues included 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.”
These governments have rejected such assertions that have been made by senior U.S. officials, including Trump, Rubio and Vice President JD Vance.
The report on Canada is less critical and acknowledges no change in U.S. assessments of its human rights conditions. However, it repeats language alleging “credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression” and accuses the federal government of limiting press freedom.
A mention of ongoing trials related to the 2022 “Freedom Convoy” protests says they protested against “draconian lockdown measures that substantially damaged the communities and economic livelihoods of many Canadians.”
Last year’s report, the final one issued by the Biden administration, said the Canadian government “did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content” and allowed independent media to “express a wide variety of views without restriction.”
Past reports have taken particular issue with violence and threats against minority groups, including Indigenous and LGBTQ2 people.
Although such deportations did not begin until after Trump took office, the reports, with one notable exception, detail general poor human rights conditions in many of the countries that have agreed to accept migrants, even if they are not citizens of that nation.
The exception is El Salvador, which was the first of several countries in Latin America and Africa to agree to accept non-citizen migrant deportees from the U.S.
Despite claims from rights advocates to the contrary, the report about the country says “there were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” in El Salvador in 2024 and that “the government took credible steps to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses.”
Human rights groups have accused authorities of abuses, including at a notorious prison where many migrants are sent.
However, for Eswatini — a small country in Africa formerly known as Swaziland — South Sudan and Rwanda, the reports paint a grimmer picture. All have agreed to accept third-country deportees from the United States.
In all three countries, the reports noted “significant human rights issues included credible reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings, torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment … serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, prohibiting independent trade unions or significant or systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association.”
Those governments “did not take credible steps or action to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses,” the reports said.
Singling out the treatment of white South Africans
South Africa was also singled out for its human rights situation “significantly worsening.”
The report pointed to unfair treatment of white Afrikaners following the signing of major land reforms that the Trump administration has said discriminate against that minority, which ran the country’s apartheid government.
That system brutally enforced racial segregation, which oppressed the Black majority, for 50 years before ending in 1994.
With the signing of that law in December, the report said that “South Africa took a substantially worrying step towards land expropriation of Afrikaners and further abuses against racial minorities in the country.”
It also said the government “did not take credible steps to investigate, prosecute and punish officials who committed human rights abuses, including inflammatory racial rhetoric against Afrikaners and other racial minorities, or violence against racial minorities.”
This year, the administration admitted as refugees some groups of white Afrikaners.
The South African government on Wednesday dismissed the report as “inaccurate and deeply flawed.”
What the report says about Brazil
Freedom-of-speech issues were also raised in Brazil, which has more recently provoked Trump’s ire by prosecuting his ally — former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro — and led to the imposition of massive U.S. tariffs and sanctions against Brazil’s Supreme Court chief justice.
“The human rights situation in Brazil declined during the year,” the report said. “The courts took broad and disproportionate action to undermine freedom of speech and internet freedom by blocking millions of users’ access to information on a major social media platform in response to a case of harassment.”
It added that the government “undermined democratic debate by restricting access to online content deemed to undermine democracy” and specifically mentioned suppressing the speech of Bolsonaro and his supporters.
—With additional files from Global News and Reuters