The US plans to significantly downplay accounts of alleged human rights abuses by Israel, Russia, and El Salvador, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday night.
The report cited leaked drafts of the State Department’s annual human rights report, which are allegedly significantly shorter than those prepared by the Biden administration.
For example, the 2025 draft for Israel is 25 pages long, as compared to 2024’s report, which was 100 pages.
Previous drafts have mentioned alleged Israeli surveillance of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Some other drafts cited Amnesty International’s findings on Israel’s use of “an experimental facial recognition system to track Palestinians and enforce movement restrictions.”
A 2023 State Department report addressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption cases along with judicial reform efforts.
The Trump administration’s draft does not mention any of these issues.
State department reports on Russia, El Salvador
The Washington Post reported that the report struck out all references to crimes against members of the LGBTQ+ community, including noted government abuses.
Keifer Buckingham, a State Department employee who had worked on these issues until January, said that edits like these were a “glaring omission” in Russia’s case.
Moscow’s Supreme Court banned LGBTQ+ organizations and labelled them “extremist” in recent pieces of legislation.
The draft for El Salvador states that there were “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” from the country in 2024.
The previous 2023 report stated that there were “significant human rights issues” in El Salvador, including instances of torture, government-approved killings, and “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”
The drafts for Russia and El Salvador are reportedly completed; Israel’s draft is marked for “quality check.”
The Washington Post report noted that the State Department’s reports are considered top-of-the-line and are widely used both domestically and internationally.
The reports are mandated to be sent to Congress by the end of February. Current and former Officials told the Washington Post that most of the reports were completed by the time the Biden administration transitioned out in January.
The Wednesday report noted that an internal memo instructed State Department employees to remove references to several potential human rights violations, including crimes against LGBTQ+ people and government corruption.
“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, told the Washington Post. “The human rights report focuses on core issues.”