MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Each year, the State Department releases its country reports on human rights. These are what they sound like - closely read reports about human rights practices, country by country. They track things like the right to privacy and freedom of expression. Well, now NPR has obtained internal state department documents that show major changes coming this year. Graham Smith is with our Investigations Desk. Hey, Graham.
GRAHAM SMITH, BYLINE: Hey, how are you doing, Mary Louise?
KELLY: I am all right. I am curious about these internal documents that you have obtained, including, I gather, one that outlines a whole host of human rights being dropped from this year's report.
SMITH: Yeah, the main thing that I got was a document describing basically how these reports are supposed to be edited down. It's a whole list of kinds of rights that should be stripped out. You mentioned the right to privacy. That's going to go away. It needs to be taken out. Also freedom of assembly, the right to free and fair elections - it tells editors basically to remove anything that isn't specifically called for in the law that asks for these reports.
KELLY: And when were these reports completed?
SMITH: These were completed in January just before President Trump took office, but his state department came in and wanted to basically change what was in these reports.
KELLY: OK, so let's make this specific. Give me an example of a specific country and how the report on it has changed or will change.
SMITH: Yeah, let's take the case of El Salvador. You look at the report for 2023, you look at the report for 2024 - this one is way smaller. Sources at state told our Michele Kelemen that the goal is to reduce the length of these reports by two-thirds. And in this case, they overshot. It's come down nearly 70%. Of course, with recent events, the Trump administration sending immigrants to be jailed there, I went looking right away for the section that covers prisons.
KELLY: Yeah.
SMITH: You look at the 2023 one, there's this huge section covering the poor conditions there, the lack of good food and water, access to medical care. In this 2024 report, all of that is gone. The whole section on prison conditions is gone. There are some details about prison deaths because there's a required category on extra judicial deaths, but none of the other stuff.
KELLY: And then, other categories, whole buckets of things disappearing. I'm curious, for example, about LGBTQ rights and how those are going to be tracked and reported on.
SMITH: They're not going to be reported on. In fact, the guidance is to remove any reference to LGBTQ people and violence against them, also violence against disabled people, sexual exploitation of women and children. There's one section that used to be in the report about denial of a fair public trial. You look in the El Salvador report, and it says that the government theoretically provides for fair and public trials, but in El Salvador, they're operating under what they call a state of exemption, which suspends those rights. And so the 2023 report says, under exemption, they allow trials of up to 900 people at a time, and that's a problem. In the 2024 draft, it's all gone.
KELLY: I just want to be clear. These are not public documents, these internal documents that you have had access to.
SMITH: Right. These were basically emails being sent to people who are supposed to be making these changes and then some, you know, sample documents, as well as the El Salvador one, which was just shared with me so I could get an idea what that crunch is going to look like. But eventually, those will be released, but not the guidance on how it should be shortened up.
KELLY: Got it. I'm sure that you reached out to the State Department to ask the obvious question of why. Have you heard back from the State Department, why these changes?
SMITH: Well, we did ask for comment. They declined to comment or answer any of our questions. But if you look at that memo with the guidance on editing, right at the top, it says the department is revising the reports to, quote, "streamline the reports," but they're still supposed to stay compliant with the law and with recently issued executive orders. But, you know, what we see here is that they're actually stripping out absolutely everything that's not specifically required to be reported by law. So things like torture, child labor, freedom of the press - they're still there. But freedom of expression for regular people - that's out.
And I have to say, when you look at the laws that underline these reports, which were passed in the '60s and '70s, you have to wonder if these new minimized reports even fulfill the legal requirements. The law specifically says the reports should be full and complete and that they should document violations of internationally recognized human rights. Some people would say that argues for a much broader set of reports than what we're seeing here.
KELLY: NPR's Graham Smith, thanks for this, and thanks for staying on it.
SMITH: Sure thing. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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