The Trump administration is overhauling the State Department’s annual reports on global human rights, emphasizing entitlements “given to us by God, our creator” and issuing new guidance for U.S. diplomats to scrutinize the prevalence of abortion and gender-transition surgery among children.
The new instructions, issued Thursday, instructed all U.S. embassies and consulates to begin preparing the annual country reports under these and numerous other guidelines that stand in sharp contrast to their historical focus on torture, politically motivated killings and persecution of minority groups. The first documents to incorporate the Trump administration’s requirements will be published next year.
Moving forward, U.S. diplomats must report on “the chemical or surgical mutilation of children” via gender-transition procedures, attempts to coerce people to engage in euthanasia, and state subsidization of abortions and the estimated number of abortions performed in a nation each year, according to one State Department official who spoke with the news media about the changes on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Trump administration.
The State Department intends to collect data on other governments’ affirmative action policies, spotlighting any that “provide preferential treatment” to workers based on gender or race. It called, too, for data on arrests or “official investigations or warnings” related to speech, this official said.
In unveiling the dramatic shift, Trump administration officials offered an unapologetically U.S.-centric and religiously tinged view of human rights. “The United States remains committed to the Declaration of Independence’s recognition that all men are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights,” said a senior State Department official also involved with briefing the news media. The aim is to focus on rights “given to us by God, our creator, not by governments.”
Tommy Pigott, a spokesman for the department, said this administration “will not allow” violations such as “the mutilation of children, laws that infringe on free speech, and racially discriminatory employment practices, to go unchecked. We are saying enough is enough,” he said.
The effort mirrors some activity undertaken during the first Trump administration, when then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo created a commission on “unalienable rights.” The commission was criticized by rights groups for focusing on property rights and religious rights while downplaying the rights of women and gay people. It made little impact before being sunsetted by the Biden administration.
Former U.S. officials and rights advocates were alarmed by Thursday’s announcement. “The State Department’s emphasis on so-called natural rights and de-emphasis on rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and other legally binding instruments suggest an intentional effort to limit rights,” said Uzra Zeya, a top official at State during the Biden administration who now leads the Human Rights First nonprofit.
Amanda Klasing, director of advocacy at Amnesty International USA, said the new focus on “elusive and undefined natural rights” ignored the defined legal purpose of the reports. “Congress mandated these reports decades ago to be based on universal human rights standards to provide it with the information needed to pass laws, fund programs and perform oversight to ensure the U.S. didn’t contribute to or fund human rights abuses,” she said.
The State Department’s human rights reports have been compiled for almost 50 years. They cover 198 countries and territories, and are routinely relied upon by courts inside and outside the United States.
The decision to radically revamp them was overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The reports covering 2024 were released in August, almost a half-year later than usual, with little fanfare and with significant details absent — particularly with regard to gender-based violence and the persecution of LGBTQ+ people.
The 2024 reports also included significantly more criticism of U.S. allies in Western Europe, including for perceived “free speech” issues related to the alleged censorship of right-wing groups or individuals.
“Free speech” has become a rallying cry for Rubio’s State Department, with another internal cable announcing this month that the issue would be a top focus for the agency to promote in public diplomacy.
Critics say that while the administration has focused on supporting the free speech of right-wing groups, it has ignored such standards in cases involving people who expressed pro-Palestinian views or who criticized the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk after his shooting death in September.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, last month wrote that the Trump administration had “launched a blitzkrieg against Americans’ free speech rights” that undermines the “United States’ credibility as the world’s leading defender of free expression as other democracies continue to falter.” Others have said the effort appears politicized.
The senior State Department official, acknowledging that the Trump administration’s approach to free speech issues is novel, defended the move. “If we were politicizing our reports,” the official said, “you’d see a softer touch in Western Europe.”
The Trump administration has frequently criticized Western European democracies for a variety of issues. And this week, President Donald Trump chided a reporter who tried to ask the Saudi crown prince about the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post opinion contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 at a Saudi consulate.
“You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Trump interjected, telling reporters that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “knew nothing” about the killing and that lots of people disliked Khashoggi. The CIA concluded during Trump’s first term that the crown prince approved the killing of Khashoggi.
Most of the data collected for the most recent human rights reports was recorded under the final year of the Biden administration, which placed a significantly different emphasis on minority rights. The senior official said that the 2024 reports were a “good preview” of what to expect next year but that the new instructions to U.S. diplomats would allow them to create something “more streamlined, readable, accessible to the public.”
Human rights activists said the 2024 reports had been edited to limit the criticism placed on key foreign policy allies with poor human rights records, including El Salvador, Israel and Saudi Arabia, while the criticism of countries at odds with the Trump administration had been amplified.
Brazil’s left-wing government, for example, was criticized for the targeting of former president Jair Bolsonaro, a key ally of Trump who was accused of attempting to stay in power with a violent coup, while South Africa was condemned for the alleged persecution of the country’s White minority — a claim widely assessed to be exaggerated for political purposes, according to independent human rights groups.
El Salvador, meanwhile, was assessed to have seen “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses,” despite repeated accounts of torture and government-sanctioned killings.
The State Department this month also issued a cable overhauling its public diplomacy arm, which oversees the bureaus of educational, cultural and global public affairs, and is tasked with participating in foreign policy development while strengthening relationships between Americans and citizens of other countries.
The cable, titled “Public Diplomacy (PD) Transformed” and signed by Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, signaled that “freedom of speech” will serve as the new north star for the agency. Rogers alleged that, before the second Trump administration, the State Department had become too willing to “put notions of ‘safety’ before liberty” and to enforce the “late 20th Century social consensus” on “upstart political forces” around the globe by committing acts of censorship.
“Our leaders reflexively set artificial boundaries to acceptable discourse, stifling opportunities to engage … emerging leaders,” Rogers wrote.
The cable, sent Nov. 12 to all diplomatic and consular posts and obtained by The Post, contained few specifics, although Rogers urged staff to broadly consider speaking or engaging with people and nations with whom the U.S. has historically avoided conversations. She also suggested State should bypass news reporters, going straight to the public by emerging onto “a broader array of platforms as well as engaging with a range of nontraditional journalists, influencers, and media personalities.”
Rogers, who was sworn in last month, came to the State Department after a career in private legal practice. She made a name for herself in conservative circles by supporting the National Rifle Association on free speech grounds and challenging the alleged censorship of right-wing figures on social media.
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