U.S. plans to ease human rights criticism of El Salvador, Israel, Russia [View all]

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/06/trump-human-rights-el-salvador-israel-russia/

U.S. plans to ease human rights criticism of El Salvador, Israel, Russia
Leaked draft reports show the Trump administration is planning to eliminate or downplay accounts of prisoner abuse, corruption, LGBTQ+ discrimination and other alleged abuses. The administration says the reports are shorter for “readability.”
August 6, 2025 at 7:48 p.m. EDT
By Adam Taylor, Hannah Natanson and John Hudson

Leaked drafts of the State Department’s long-delayed annual human rights reports indicate that the Trump administration intends to dramatically scale back U.S. government criticism of certain foreign nations with extensive records of abuse.

The draft human rights reports for El Salvador, Israel and Russia, copies of which were reviewed by The Washington Post, are significantly shorter than the ones prepared last year by the Biden administration. They strike all references to LGBTQ+ individuals or crimes against them, and the descriptions of government abuses that do remain have been softened.

The draft report for El Salvador — which, at the Trump administration’s urging, has agreed to incarcerate migrants deported from the United States — states that the country had “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” in 2024. The State Department’s previous report for El Salvador, documenting 2023, identified “significant human rights issues” there — including government-sanctioned killings, instances of torture, and “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”

Several Venezuelans whom the Trump administration sent to a Salvadoran prison said they were subjected to repeated beatings.

The leaked draft reports for El Salvador, Israel and Russia underscore how the Trump administration is radically rethinking America’s role in global human rights advocacy. The documents also are consistent with internal guidance circulated earlier this year by State Department leaders who advised staff to truncate the reports to the minimum required by statutory guidelines and executive orders signed by President Donald Trump, and to remove references to government corruption, gender-based crimes and other abuses the U.S. government historically has documented.

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