{"id":39397,"date":"2025-04-21T18:54:52","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T18:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/21\/state-dept-defends-human-rights-abuse-report-changes-says-streamlined-process-eliminates-political-bias\/"},"modified":"2025-04-21T18:54:52","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T18:54:52","slug":"state-dept-defends-human-rights-abuse-report-changes-says-streamlined-process-eliminates-political-bias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/21\/state-dept-defends-human-rights-abuse-report-changes-says-streamlined-process-eliminates-political-bias\/","title":{"rendered":"State Dept defends human rights abuse report changes, says streamlined process eliminates ‘political bias’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The State Department<\/a> is pushing back against criticism of its changes to the process of reporting human rights abuses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

NPR reported<\/a> last week that the Trump administration was scaling back annual reports meant to inform congressional decisions on allocating foreign aid to countries, claiming the State Department was “changing its mind on what it calls human rights.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fox News Digital is told the 2024 Human Rights Report has been restructured to remove redundancy, increase readability, and return the focus to human rights abuses \u2013 instead of a “laundry list of politically biased demands and assertions.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

RUBIO ANNOUNCES CLOSURE OF STATE DEPARTMENT EFFORT THAT ‘WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD ALREADY’<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

“NPR\u2019s report that the State Department is scaling back the Human Rights Report is misleading and misguided,” a senior State Department official told Fox News Digital. “This year\u2019s modifications are critical for removing report redundancy, increasing readability, maintaining consistency to U.S. statutes, and returning focus to human rights issues rather than political bias.”<\/p>\n

Fox News Digital is told the restructuring of the reports “will be more responsive to legislative mandates that underpin the report” and “does not reflect a change in U.S. policy on promoting respect for human rights around the globe or in any particular country.” The State Department notably has attempted to streamline the reports to better align with statutory requirements under both Republican and Democratic administrations.<\/p>\n

NPR and Politico reported <\/a>on an internal memo that purportedly showed the 2024 Human Rights Report, which was finished in January but has been adjusted under the new administration, will no longer include references to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) or sections on discrimination or abuse against the LGBTQ+ community.\u00a0<\/p>\n

STATE DEPARTMENT’S \u2018GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT CENTER\u2019 ACCUSED OF CENSORING AMERICANS SHUTS ITS DOORS<\/u><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The annual reports \u2013 known as “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” \u2013 normally come out in March or April. NPR said sections that called out countries for “forcibly returning a refugee or asylum-seeker<\/a> to a home country” or the “serious harassment of human rights organizations” would be absent this year. NPR also stressed that prior reports had sections detailing countries’ “involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices,” “arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy,” “serious restrictions to internet freedom,” “extensive gender-based violence,” and “violence or threats of violence targeting people with disabilities,” but the new report would not.<\/p>\n

Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International, USA, criticized the changes under the Trump administration. He told NPR: “What this is, is a signal that the United States is no longer going to [pressure] other countries to uphold those rights that guarantee civic and political freedoms \u2013 the ability to speak, to express yourself, to gather, to protest, to organize.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

During President Donald Trump’s first term, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo<\/a> cited what he categorized as a “proliferation of human rights” on the global stage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP<\/u><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

“We wanted to go back to first principles, back to our founding documents, our Declaration of Independence, our Bill of Rights to focus on those things that are central to the understanding of rights here in America,” he said in July 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Secretary of State Marco Rubio<\/a> is overseeing changes at the department during Trump’s second term. Last week, he announced the closure of the\u00a0State Department\u2019s\u00a0Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R\/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center\u00a0(GEC), which he accused of costing taxpayers more than $50 million per year and spending “millions\u00a0of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The State Department is pushing back against criticism of its changes to the process of reporting human rights abuses.\u00a0 NPR reported last week that the Trump administration was scaling back annual reports meant to inform congressional decisions on allocating foreign aid to countries, claiming the State Department was “changing its mind on what it calls … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}