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 U.S. Representative Chris Smith said the bill, which he expects to
finalize in a month and introduce in the House of Representatives in
six weeks, will call for some of the biggest changes in a decade in
how Washington grades global efforts against modern slavery.
The move follows a Reuters investigation that found that senior
diplomats inflated assessments of 14 strategically important
countries in the State Department's 2015 report.
In an interview with Reuters at his Capitol Hill office, the New
Jersey Republican said he wants to increase accountability and
oversight for a ranking system that has been criticized by some
lawmakers and human rights activists as increasingly politicized.
The State Department said it stands by the “integrity of the
process” that yielded the latest human trafficking report on July
27. Asked about the drafting of a new bill, State Department
spokesman John Kirby said: “We defer questions on potential
legislation to the Hill."
Smith hopes to build momentum for reform by chairing three
congressional hearings in March and April, aiming to win passage in
the House in the second half of the year before turning to the
Senate, where he could face stiffer resistance.
 “We’re going to stay with this until it gets done,” said Smith, who
authored the 2000 law that created a State Department office to
independently rate countries for their records on human trafficking.
“And we want to get it done comprehensively.”
Smith, a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and
chair of its global human rights subcommittee, has begun
coordinating on the bill with Senator Bob Corker, Republican
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, aides said. He
plans to call Susan Coppedge, a former Georgia prosecutor who
recently became the anti-trafficking office’s ambassador-at-large,
to testify at the hearings.
Some State Department officials have privately expressed concern
that if Congress goes too far in expanding its oversight, it could
add another level of political interference to ranking decisions.
Though the global fight against human trafficking has traditionally
been an area of bipartisan cooperation in Congress, Smith’s reform
bill could face trouble winning approval in an election year,
especially in the Senate, where 60 votes are required to move
forward on any legislation.
The Reuters review, published last August and based on dozens of
interviews in Washington and foreign capitals as well on internal
State Department documents, determined that the anti-trafficking
unit was repeatedly overruled by senior U.S. diplomats in the
report.
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Further Reuters investigations detailed how diplomatic priorities
trumped human rights concerns in a series of decisions in the
report, which can lead to sanctions for the worst offenders.
(http://www.reuters.com/subjects/human-rights-2015)
Malaysia, Uzbekistan and Cuba were among the countries upgraded from
a blacklist of the worst human-trafficking offenders, and China,
India and Oman also wound up with better grades than the State
Department’s own human trafficking experts wanted to give them.
Smith’s plan is to insert a series of changes in so-called
“reauthorization” legislation, which is periodically required by law
to renew the 15-year-old federal statute that undergirds the State
Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
TOUGHER RULES
Some of the ideas under consideration for the bill, according to
Smith and his aides, include:
-A new requirement that any country that has an “official policy of
trafficking its own people” be kept at the lowest ranking until such
practices are abolished. A primary target for such a reform would be
Uzbekistan, which mobilizes roughly a million citizens each year for
its cotton harvest, the aides said.
-A new rule that would block upgrades for countries whose
state-owned enterprises are found to engage in forced labor, a
provision that drafters believe could put China and Vietnam under
particular scrutiny.
-Stricter limits on how long and for what reasons a country will be
allowed to remain on the so-called “Watch List,” one level above the
worst ranking, before they are automatically downgraded.
-A requirement that countries must cooperate fully with the State
Department in reporting on the number of arrests and convictions for
human trafficking as a condition for securing upgrades or avoiding
downgrades.
(Editing By Stuart Grudgings)
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