WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Trump administration plans to scale back criticism of El Salvador, Israel and Russia over human rights, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing drafts of the State Department’s annual human rights reports.
The draft reports related to those countries were significantly shorter than the ones prepared by the administration of Democratic former President Joe Biden, who left office in January, when Donald Trump assumed the presidency.
The State Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters on Wednesday, has not yet officially released this year’s reports, which cover last year’s incidents.
Usually, these annual reports are released around March or April each year.
“The 2024 Human Rights Report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancies, increases report readability and is more responsive to the legislative mandates that underpin the report,” a State Department official briefing reporters on Wednesday said.
“The report is not meant to be a every single human rights abuse that’s happened in every single country. It’s meant to be illustrative and a broad picture of what the conditions of human rights are on the ground in each country.”
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh, Humeyra Pamuk and Costas Pitas; Editing by Ross Colvin and Stephen Coates)
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