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 Democratic Senator Bob Menendez called the account “alarming &
unacceptable if true”, tweeting that “we must get to the bottom of
this” at a Senate hearing set for Thursday to review the 2015
Trafficking in Persons report.
A Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen
people in Washington and foreign capitals, showed that the State
Department office set up to independently grade global efforts to
fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior diplomats
and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 countries in this
year’s report.
Among the countries that received higher rankings than recommended
by the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons were
Malaysia, Cuba, China, India, Uzbekistan and Mexico, the sources
said.
“It’s shameful that President Obama allowed a bunch of political
hacks to alter the administration’s human trafficking report to the
benefit of perennial violators like Cuba and Malaysia,” said U.S.
Senator Marco Rubio, who is also a Republican presidential
candidate.
Rubio called it a “dangerous precedent”. He sits along with Menendez
on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which this week will
question Sarah Sewall, who oversees the anti-trafficking office as
Undersecretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human
Rights.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, another Republican presidential
candidate, also weighed in. “Obama and State Dept should be ashamed
of their purely political manipulation of Cuba's human trafficking
issues,” he tweeted.
Analysts in the anti-trafficking office, or J/TIP, as it is known
within the U.S. government, disagreed with U.S. diplomatic bureaus
on ratings for 17 countries, the sources said.
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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, in the report published on
July 27, according to the sources.
Cuba, Malaysia and Uzbekistan were upgraded, despite J/TIP’s
objections, from the lowest ranking in the report that publicly
shames the world’s worst offenders in human trafficking.
The Malaysian upgrade could smooth the way for an ambitious proposed
U.S.-led free-trade deal with the Southeast Asian nation and 11
other countries.
The number of rejected recommendations suggests a degree of
intervention not previously seen by top State Department diplomats
in a report that can lead to sanctions.
Human rights groups and some former State Department officials have
expressed concern that such unearned higher grades undermine the
credibility of the annual report.
(Reporting By Matt Spetalnick and Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Ken
Wills)
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