State Dept. Releases 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
The reports document human rights developments in almost 200 countries and territories.
Published by The Lawfare Institute
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On Aug. 12, the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor released its country reports on Human Rights Practices for 2024. The collection of reports, which has been published annually since the late 1970s and is also referred to as the Human Rights Report (HRR), tracks and analyzes the state of human rights in all countries receiving U.S. assistance and all United Nations member states. Nearly 200 countries and territories were included in this year’s HRR.
This year’s reports were structured differently from previous HRRs. Most notably, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not write a preface to the reports—as secretaries of state from previous administrations have done. What’s more, the Trump administration reportedly added new evaluation categories including “Life” and “Liberty” and “Security of Person,” and removed other categories—such as freedom of expression, gender-based violence, violence against LGBTQ+ individuals, and environmental justice—entirely. According to NPR, an internal State Department memo described the cuts as an attempt to make the reports “more readable.”
Notably, country reports on important partner countries of the Trump administration were significantly shorter than in previous years. The 2024 country report on El Salvador, for example, stated “[t]here were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses,” a clear departure from the 2023 country report which mentioned that there were “significant human rights abuses” and life-threatening prison conditions. And in the country report on Israel, the State Department made no mention of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
The State Department made little acknowledgment that this year’s reports were dramatically different from previous HRRs. The appendix briefly addressed general changes to substance, but only to note that quantitative analysis of human rights practices was not a focus of this year’s reports.
You can read the 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices here or below:
Africa (Sub-Saharan)
East Asia and Pacific
North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea)
South Korea (Republic of Korea)
Europe and Eurasia
Near East (Middle East and North Africa)
Israel (incl West Bank and Gaza)
South and Central Asia
Western Hemisphere
