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 The State Department’s senior political staff saw it differently —
and they prevailed.
A Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen
sources in Washington and foreign capitals, shows that the
government office set up to independently grade global efforts to
fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior American
diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14
strategically important countries in this year’s Trafficking in
Persons report.
In all, analysts in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons - or J/TIP, as it’s known within the U.S. government —
disagreed with U.S. diplomatic bureaus on ratings for 17 countries,
the sources said.
The analysts, who are specialists in assessing efforts to combat
modern slavery - such as the illegal trade in humans for forced
labor or prostitution - won only three of those disputes, the worst
ratio in the 15-year history of the unit, according to the sources.
As a result, not only Malaysia, Cuba and China, but countries such
as India, Uzbekistan and Mexico, wound up with better grades than
the State Department’s human-rights experts wanted to give them, the
sources said. (Graphic looking at some of the key decisions here:
http://reut.rs/1gF2Wz5)
 Of the three disputes J/TIP won, the most prominent was Thailand,
which has faced scrutiny over forced labor at sea and the
trafficking of Rohingya Muslims through its southern jungles.
Diplomats had sought to upgrade it to so-called “Tier 2 Watch List”
status. It remains on “Tier 3” - the rating for countries with the
worst human-trafficking records.
The number of rejected recommendations suggests a degree of
intervention not previously known by diplomats in a report that can
lead to sanctions and is the basis for many countries’
anti-trafficking policies. This year, local embassies and other
constituencies within the department were able to block some of the
toughest grades.
State Department officials say the ratings are not politicized. “As
is always the case, final decisions are reached only after rigorous
analysis and discussion between the TIP office, relevant regional
bureaus and senior State Department leaders,” State Department
spokesman John Kirby said in response to queries by Reuters.
Still, by the time the report was released on July 27, Malaysia and
Cuba were both removed from the "Tier 3" blacklist, even though the
State Department’s own trafficking experts believed neither had made
notable improvements, according to the sources.
The Malaysian upgrade, which was highly criticized by human rights
groups, could smooth the way for an ambitious proposed U.S.-led
free-trade deal with the Southeast Asian nation and 11 other
countries.
Ending Communist-ruled Cuba’s 12 years on the report’s blacklist
came as the two nations reopened embassies on each other’s soil
following their historic détente over the past eight months.
And for China, the experts’ recommendation to downgrade it to the
worst ranking, Tier 3, was overruled despite the report’s conclusion
that Beijing did not undertake increased anti-trafficking efforts.
That would have put China alongside the likes of Syria and North
Korea, regarded by the United Nations as among the world’s worst
human right abusers.
Typically, J/TIP wins more than half of what officials call
“disputes” with diplomatic sections of the State Department,
according to people familiar with the process.
“Certainly we have never seen that kind of an outcome,” said one
U.S. official with direct knowledge of the department.
ABILITY TO EMBARRASS
The Trafficking in Persons report, which evaluated 188 countries and
territories this year, calls itself the world’s most comprehensive
resource of governmental anti-human trafficking efforts. Rights
groups mostly agree.
It organizes countries into tiers based on trafficking records: Tier
1 for nations that meet minimum U.S. standards; Tier 2 for those
making significant efforts to meet those standards; Tier 2 "Watch
List" for those that deserve special scrutiny; and Tier 3 for
countries that fail to comply with the minimum U.S. standards and
are not making significant efforts.
While a Tier 3 ranking can trigger sanctions limiting access to aid
from the United States, the International Monetary Fund or the World
Bank, such action is frequently waived.
The real power is its ability to embarrass countries into action.
Many countries aggressively lobby U.S. embassies to try to avoid
sliding into the Tier 3 category. Four straight years on the Tier 2
Watch List triggers an automatic downgrade to Tier 3 unless a
country earns a waiver or an upgrade.
The leverage has brought some success, including pressuring
Switzerland to close loopholes that allowed the prostitution of
minors and prompting the Dominican Republic to convict more child
trafficking offenders.
President Barack Obama has called the fight against human
trafficking “one of the great human rights causes of our time” and
has pledged the United States “will continue to lead it.”
But the office set up in 2001 by a congressional mandate to
spearhead that effort is increasingly struggling to publish
independent assessments of the most diplomatically important
countries, the sources said.
The rejection of so many recommendations could strengthen calls by
some lawmakers to investigate how the report is compiled. After
Reuters on July 8 reported on the plans to upgrade Malaysia, 160
members of the U.S. House and 18 U.S. senators wrote to Secretary of
State John Kerry urging him to keep Malaysia in Tier 3, based on its
trafficking record. They questioned whether the upgrade was
politically motivated.
 Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, has threatened to call for a
Senate hearing and an inspector general to investigate if top State
Department officials removed Malaysia from the lowest tier for
political reasons.
The final decision on disputed rankings this year was made in
meetings attended by some of the State Department’s most powerful
diplomats, including Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Under
Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman and Kerry’s
Chief of Staff, Jonathan Finer, according to the sources.
Sarah Sewall, who oversees J/TIP as Undersecretary of State for
Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights, presented the
experts’ recommendations, the sources said. The State Department
declined to make any of those officials available for comment.
“NO, NO, NO”
The unprecedented degree of discord over this trafficking report
began to become clear after Reuters early last month revealed plans
to upgrade Malaysia from the lowest Tier 3 rank to Tier 2 Watch
List.
The improved ranking came in a year in which Malaysian authorities
discovered dozens of suspected mass migrant graves and human rights
groups reported continued forced labor in the nation’s lucrative
palm oil, construction and electronics industries. As recently as
April, the U.S. ambassador to Malaysia, Joseph Yun, urged the
country to take prosecution of human trafficking violations more
seriously.
U.S. officials have denied that political considerations influenced
Malaysia’s rankings.
[to top of second column] |
“No, no, no,” said Sewall, when asked by reporters last Monday
whether Malaysia was upgraded to facilitate trade negotiations. She
said the decision was based on how Malaysia was dealing with
trafficking.
Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who authored a
2000 law that led to the creation of J/TIP, said in an interview
that the office’s authority is being undermined by the president’s
agenda. “It’s so politicized,” he said.
If Malaysia had remained on Tier 3, it would have posed a potential
barrier to Obama's proposed trade pact, the Trans-Pacific
Partnership. That deal is a crucial part of his pivot to Asia
policy. Congress approved legislation in June giving Obama expanded
trade negotiating powers but prohibiting deals with Tier 3 countries
such as, at that time, Malaysia.
Congressional sources and current and former State Department
officials said experts in the J/TIP office had recommended keeping
Malaysia on Tier 3, highlighting a drop in human-trafficking
convictions in the country to three last year from nine in 2013.
They said, according to the sources, that some of Malaysia’s efforts
to end forced labor amounted to promises rather than action.
The analysts also clashed over Cuba’s record with the State
Department’s Western Hemisphere Affairs Bureau, whose view took
precedence in the final report.
Human rights groups and people with knowledge of the negotiations
over the rankings said an unearned upgrade for Cuba, especially at a
time of intense attention due to the historic diplomatic thaw
between Washington and Havana, could undermine the integrity of the
report.
Cuba had been on the “border line” for an upgrade in recent years, a
former State Department official said. And although Cuba ended up
with an upgrade, the final report remained highly critical, citing
concerns about Cuba’s failure to deal with a degree of alleged
forced labor in medical missions that Havana sends to developing
countries.
China was another source of friction. J/TIP’s analysts called for
downgrading China, the world’s second-biggest economy, to Tier 3,
criticizing Beijing for failing to follow through on a promise to
abolish its “re-education through labor” system and to adequately
protect trafficking victims from neighboring countries such as North
Korea. The final report put China on Tier 2 Watch List.
SHOWING DEFERENCE
But the candor of J/TIP can run afoul of other important diplomatic
priorities, particularly in countries beset by instability or
corruption where U.S. diplomats are trying to build relationships.
That leads every year to sometimes contentious back-and-forth over
the rankings with far-flung embassies and regional bureaus – the
diplomatic centers of gravity at the State Department.
“There is supposed to be some deference to the expertise of the
office,” said Mark Lagon, J/TIP’s ambassador-at-large from 2007 to
2009 and now president of Freedom House, an advocacy group in
Washington. If the office is now losing more disputes over rankings
than it is winning, that would be “an unfortunate thing,” he said.
Most U.S. diplomats are reluctant to openly strike back at critics
inside and outside of the administration who accuse them of letting
politics trump human rights, the sources said.
But privately, some diplomats say that J/TIP staffers should avoid
acting like “purists” and keep sight of broader U.S. interests,
including maintaining open channels with authoritarian governments
to push for reform and forging trade deals that could lift people
out of poverty.
From the start, J/TIP has tried to be impartial. It is based in a
building a few blocks away from State Department, adding to the
sense of two separate identities and cultures.
But establishing genuine independence has been difficult. At first,
the heads of regional bureaus, representing the business and
political interests of U.S. embassies, would join the J/TIP team
around a table and have almost an equal say in deciding country
rankings in the final report.
John Miller, a former Republican congressman from Washington state
named by President George W. Bush to head the bureau from 2002 to
2006, overhauled that structure.
“I said ‘no way’,” Miller said in an interview. By 2004, decisions
on how to rank countries were made by his office. Diplomats who
objected could appeal to then deputy secretary of state Richard
Armitage. “He rarely overruled me,” said Miller. Armitage, who is no
longer in a government job, did not respond to a request for comment
sent through his office.
Laura Lederer, who helped set the office up as senior human
trafficking adviser from 2002 to 2007, said its job was “to assess
and rate countries solely on their progress in addressing the
prevention of trafficking, the prosecution of traffickers, and
protection and assistance of victims.”
But officials who worked in the office over the past 15 years
acknowledge that countries with sensitive diplomatic or trade
relationships with the United States sometimes received special
treatment following pressure from local embassies and other
constituencies within the department.
One such country is Mexico – a key trading partner whose cooperation
is also needed against drug trafficking and illegal immigration. It
was kept at Tier 2 despite the anti-trafficking unit’s call for a
worse grade, according to officials in Washington and Mexico City.
The controversy over this year’s report comes at a time when J/TIP
lacks a congressionally confirmed leader.
The prior chief, ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca, left in November
of last year. His deputy, Alison Friedman, then resigned to join a
non-profit anti-slavery organization. And then it took until
mid-July for Obama to nominate Georgia federal prosecutor Susan
Coppedge as the next ambassador-at-large.
The lack of a director can increase the unit’s exposure to political
influence, said Lederer.
Some say the perceived hit to the integrity of the 2015 report could
do lasting damage.
“It only takes one year of this kind of really deleterious political
effect to kill its credibility,” said Mark Taylor, a former senior
coordinator for reports and political affairs at J/TIP from 2003 to
2013.
(Reporting by Jason Szep and Matt Spetalnick; Additional reporting
by Patricia Zengerle in Washington, Dave Graham in Mexico City,
Michael Martina in Beijing, and Dan Trotta in Havana; Editing by
Martin Howell)
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