The Trump Administration is Trying to Change the Historical Definition of Human Rights

Time​ Magazine

21-05-2025

Every spring, since the late 1970s, the State Department has released the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. This year, those waiting for these documents will have to hold on a bit longer. The Trump Administration is upending decades of precedence to substantially revise the reports. The 2024 version of the reports were initially completed before President Donald Trump took office, but are now being re-edited.
When they are released, these reports will now reportedly exclude information on issues such as government efforts to deny freedom of movement and peaceful assembly, failures to retain or provide due process for political prisoners, and the harassment of human rights organizations. The Trump Administration has also signaled it will cut sections about the rights of women, the disabled, and the LGBTQ+ community.
These Country Reports offer a detailed account of the state of every country's human rights practices and are meant to inform congressional decisions on foreign aid allocations and security assistance. The reports have taken on added importance over the years. They're increasingly used as a tool to pressure governments to improve their practices, while advocacy organizations and lawyers rely on them to aid in asylum cases and demonstrate fear of persecution. By revising and cutting out substantial sections addressing an array of rights concerns that the U.S. has cared about for almost five decades, the Trump Administration is undermining the definition of human rights as a concept.
These State Department reports were first introduced at a key moment in U.S. human rights history—although they did not arrive without controversy. As human rights grew as an important organizing concept in the 1960s and the 1970s around the world, U.S. presidents were largely resistant to incorporating it into U.S. foreign policy decision-making. President Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford's powerful Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, encapsulated this opposition by claiming that taking into account morality or human rights in foreign policy was 'totally devoid of contacts with reality and would lead to empty posturing.' Instead, Kissinger's State Department was dominated by Cold War concerns that relied on a realist approach to foreign policy and focused on great power politics that eschewed concerns like human rights.
In response, as historian Barbara Keys has outlined, Congress tried to pressure State Department officials to reconsider, passing legislation that tied foreign aid to human rights criteria. One important provision that Congress approved was Section 502B of the 1974 Foreign Assistance Act, which, among other measures, requires the Secretary of State to provide annual human rights reports.
The reports were one of the first steps by the U.S. government to collect and monitor human rights practices in countries around the globe. It allowed Congress to identify 'gross violators of human rights' and then cut off funding. That authority alone helped the government bring attention to rights issues, educate the public, and apply diplomatic pressure.
But the reports were contentious from the beginning. Regional bureaus in the State Department hotly debated what should and should not be included or classified. Some of the first reports were notably restrained in the documentation of abuses, especially compared to the language human rights advocacy groups used to describe violations.
Meanwhile, Kissinger remained inflexible in his position, refusing to provide Congress with the reports in 1975. Instead, he only issued an overview of the state of global human rights without determining each country's abuses. The following year, Congress responded by strengthening the reporting provision, requiring that 'a full and complete report' be given to Congress 'with respect to practices regarding the observance of and respect for internationally recognized human rights in each country proposed as a recipient of security assistance.'
The reports took on new meaning under President Jimmy Carter's administration. Often considered the 'first human rights president,' Carter and his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, declassified and publicized these reports, using them to inform policy decisions. Carter broke with a long line of presidents who claimed ignorance about abuses in other countries, seeking to draw lessons from the documentation of such abuses abroad, and using reports to inform decisions about aid and to provide the State Department and advocacy groups with leverage for securing human rights around the globe.
President Ronald Reagan, more forceful in his Cold War aims and, like Kissinger, wary of human rights considerations, still adhered to the State Department human rights reporting requirements. While initially using the reports to downplay concerns about violations of social and economic rights, by the latter part of his second term in office, his administration's Country Reports criticized even ally regimes, such as Chile. The administration also used the reports to highlight its goals of democracy promotion, a strategy that aligned with its Cold War policies.
By the early 1990s, and with the end of the Cold War, these reports expanded in scope and institutionalized human rights into the practices of the State Department. As political scientist Kathryn Sikkink has argued, the reports required that 'at least one foreign service officer in every embassy around the globe' had to gather systematic information on human rights issues as part of their jobs. Over the decade, the reports grew more detailed, expansive, and accurate, which has made them vital to so many groups in the 21st century.
Tracing the emergence of these reports demonstrates that Trump is hardly the first president to politicize his legal responsibility to Congress through its State Department reporting requirements. Debates about what and how much to include in these reports emerged in the first years of the legislative onus and has continued to varying degrees with presidents ever since.
The difference today lays in the scope and scaling back of the current president's vision of human rights. During his first term in office, Trump tried to redefine human rights through then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's Commission on Unalienable Rights, which focused on pairing human rights with religious freedom and decoupling it from reproductive rights. The State Department also sought to pare back Country Reports on abortion and contraceptive issues as well as racial, ethnic, and sexual discrimination.
Since January 2025, though, the Trump Administration has not just sought to downplay or deprioritize human rights, but rather to redefine the concept completely. Reporting on impending changes notes that any reference to LGBTQ+ rights is absent. Sections on the ability or right for minorities to participate in the political process, and freedom of expression for citizens, also could be cut. Parts of the report that describe prison conditions are expected to be erased, and corruption in government, especially in administrations friendly to the president, including that of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, may be nixed as well.
In essence, the Trump Administration may fulfill its congressional mandate, but only minimally and with implied disregard for the now-internationally recognized idea of human rights.
In the aftermath of these potential revisions being leaked, Amnesty International USA raised the alarm, declaring that the shifts signaled that the United States is no longer going to uphold—or hold other countries accountable for upholding—human rights. Along with this stark warning, the history of these reports shows how activists have found ways to raise awareness about human rights around the world.
Debbie Sharnak is Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at Rowan University, the author of Of Light and Struggle: Social Justice, Human Rights, and Accountability in Uruguay, and the co-editor of Uruguay in Transnational Perspective.