In March 2018, the first annual 'Country Reports on Human Rights Practices' produced under the Trump administration were published, covering world events in 2017. These Congressionally mandated reports are relied upon to inform foreign aid, foreign policy and diplomatic engagements. They are also used as a tool for human rights defenders and governments to highlight human rights abuses and to hold regimes to account.
Crucially for our work at Asylum Research Centre (ARC) they are also widely used in refugee decision making procedures throughout the word. They are relied upon by legal representatives in the preparation of cases, by state decision makers and are regularly cited in the Home Office’s country specific asylum policy, which provides guidance to decision-makers on assessing asylum claims. They also feature in guidance issued by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and in reports by the European Asylum Support Office, the body tasked with harmonising refugee decision making across the EU. The European Court of Human Rights has “often attached importance” to the information contained in these reports.
It was immediately clear when the 2017 reports were issued that they had undergone structural amendments compared to the 2016 editions, the last reports prepared under Obama’s administration. The 2017 reports had in general become shorter and certain sections were removed or renamed, significantly altering the content of the reports. Most notably the 2016 subsection on "Reproductive Rights" was renamed "Coercion in Population Control" in the 2017 reports. This was in line with the Trump administration’s “global gag rule” which restricts federal funding for non-governmental organisations that provide abortion related services and the scaling back of U.S. support for international sexual and reproductive health programmes. Amnesty International, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch all pointed to other notable gaps including the reduced reporting on women’s and LGBTI rights and omissions of abuses perpetrated by non-state actors.
