Syria's new rulers set up a committee to probe attacks on civilians in recent sectarian violence
The fighting in Sweida province earlier in July killed hundreds of people, displaced tens of thousands, and threatened to unravel Syria's fragile postwar transition .
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State Department Removes Anti-LGBTQ+ Violence From Human Rights Report Draft
The Trump administration has removed all references to violence against LGBTQ+ people and gender-based violence in drafts of the State Department's much anticipated annual report on international human rights. The draft of the report, which was leaked to and first reported by The Washington Post on Wednesday, scales back its critiques of abuses in countries with a record of human rights abuses. In particular, the Post learned of drafts of human rights reports for El Salvador, Israel and Russia that completely excise references of LGBTQ+ people and violence toward those communities. The erasure of LGBTQ+ people and the abuses they face in the draft report underscores the Trump administration's intention to scale back references to human rights broadly and take its anti-LGBTQ+ agenda worldwide. 'The 2024 Human Rights report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancies, increases report readability and is more responsive to the legislative mandate that underpins the report,' a senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to brief the news media, told reporters on Wednesday. 'The human rights report focuses on core issues.' The State Department did not immediately respond to HuffPost's request for comment. In a section about El Salvador, the draft report notes the country had 'no credible reports of significant human rights abuses.' In a previous report from 2023, the State Department found 'significant human rights issues' in El Salvador, including 'politically motivated killings' and 'harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.' This spring, President Donald Trump secured a multimillion-dollar deal with El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele to allow 252 Venezuelan men in the U.S. to be deported and housed within the country's notorious new Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. After being jailed for more than 120 days at CECOT, the men, most of who had no criminal history, told stories of being physically and mentally abused for days on end. Jerce Reyes Barrios, one of the men held at CECOT, told HuffPost reporters Jessica Schulberg and Matt Shuham about his harrowing experience inside the prison. Reyes Barrios recalled a prison official saying, 'Welcome to hell on earth, where you'll be condemned to spend the rest of your lives; where I'm going to make sure that you never eat chicken or meat again.' Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay Venezuelan makeup artist, alleged that CECOT guards groped him and forced him to perform oral sex while he was in solitary confinement. A former State Department employee, Keifer Buckingham, said the removal of references to violence against LGBTQ+ people was a 'glaring omission,' especially when it comes to Russia. In 2023, Russia's supreme court deemed what it called an 'international LGBT public movement' as extremist, and the courts began their first convictions of people last year under the order. In February of 2024, a man in Volgograd was found guilty of 'displaying the symbols of an extremist organisation' after posting a photo of the LGBTQ pride flag on social media. That same month, a woman near Moscow was sentenced to five days detention for wearing frog-shaped earrings that were rainbow colored. The drafts of the reports for El Salvador and Russia were marked 'finalized,' and the draft for Israel was marked 'quality check,' according to the Post. It is still unclear when the reports, which are typically released to the public each March or April, will be sent to Congress and then the public, and if they will include these omissions. U.S. diplomats have released the State Department's annual human rights reports for nearly 50 years. Historically their findings have been widely read and anticipated by foreign leaders and diplomats, and have been used in legal proceedings both domestically and abroad. However, this year human rights advocates decried the news about the ways in which the Trump administration has softened the descriptions of human rights abuses, especially the violence against LGBTQ+ people. Uzra Zeya, the CEO of Human Rights First, an international human rights nonprofit, said in a statement that the changes were 'a radical break' from the original goal to 'objectively and even-handedly describe the human rights situation in every country and territory in the world.' 'This severely undermines their credibility and value in guiding U.S. decision-making on a wide range of critical foreign policy issues. Purging mention of elections, corruption, and global human rights abuses against LGBTQI+ persons, persons with disabilities, women and girls, refugees and other vulnerable groups runs counter to American interests and values and makes Americans abroad less safe and informed,' she continued. Amanda Klasing, the national director of government relations for Amnesty International, said in a statement that she believes the mandate to scale back the report came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who instructed employees to delete sections that included stories from survivors of human rights violations and to ignore instances of repression in certain countries. 'The secretary's instructions were to cut everything not legislatively mandated, but the leaked documents appear to show effort to narrow the scope of what the world hears about human rights abuses around the world,' she wrote. 'The downplaying or exclusion of key issues, such as discrimination and attacks on civil society, from this year's report will hinder efforts from governments and civil society organizations around the world to respond to these abuses,' she continued. The Trump administration's erasure of LGBTQ+ people and gender-based violence has continued on other international stages. At a United Nations meeting in June, a U.S. delegate spent much of her time in a routing meeting on pollution to discuss the United States' new 'national position' on gender. 'Use of the term 'gender' replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity and is demeaning and unfair, especially to women and girls,' the delegate said. In at least six speeches before the United Nations, U.S. delegates have condemned what it calls 'gender ideology,' and pushed the Trump administration's support for recognizing so-called 'biological sex,' according to ProPublica. During his first day in office, Trump signed an executive declaring that the federal government only recognizes 'two sexes, male and female,' and signaled that all references to 'gender' would thus be replaced with the term 'biological sex.'
