Key members of Congress vowed to scrutinize a new State Department human trafficking report that stands by its decision to upgrade the status countries such as Cuba and Malaysia, despite a congressional investigation last year that found senior officials had recommended these upgrades without seeing any improvements in those countries.
Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., a senior member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, said he is disappointed but not surprised by the State Department’s position, which he said amounts to a failure to restore credibility to the report.
“The rankings given to Malaysia, Cuba and other countries do not match the facts on the ground,” he said. “To be sure, they do not match with the report’s own accounts of what is going on in those countries.”
Menendez promised “aggressive” congressional oversight of the way the State Department came to its final conclusions about the upgrades. He also promised to draft legislation aimed at reforming the review process.
“I expect Congress to be aggressive in its oversight and thoroughly investigate the methodology used to justify this year’s rankings,” he said. “Further, I am convinced that new legislation to reform the ranking process is the only way to restore credibility to this broken system and I plan on introducing a bill to do just that.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said the new report’s upgraded rankings for Cambodia and Thailand are raising red flags because both government’s problems with corruption are known for playing a role in furthering human trafficking.
“I certainly hope this year’s rankings don’t reflect the types of political compromises that hurt last year’s report,” he said. “The [report] must continue to be an honest account of anti-trafficking efforts, period.”
A Reuters examination last year, which was based on interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington and foreign capitals, found that the government office charged with independently grading global efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior U.S. diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 other important countries in last year’s Trafficking in Persons report, or TIP report.
The Reuters review found that the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons disagreed with the U.S. diplomatic bureaus on ratings for 17 countries.
The disputes over scores for Cuba and Malaysia received the most scrutiny last year because of the Obama administration’s diplomatic goals. Both were removed from the “Tier 3” blacklist even though State experts argued that neither had made notable improvements.
After spending 12 years on the blacklist, Cuba’s grade was improved as President Obama sought to renew diplomatic ties with the island nation. The Malaysian upgrade came as Obama was forging the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade deal with the Southeast Asian nation and 11 other countries in the Pacific Rim, as well as elsewhere.
Both upgrades are intact in the TIP report released Tuesday. In addition, the new report removes Cambodia from the blacklist of worst offenders, upgrading its score to a Tier 2 offender from a Tier 3 that it received last year. Thailand, meanwhile, was upgraded from the Tier 3 rating to the so-called “Tier 2 Watch List.”
The report organizes countries into tiers based on a U.S. assessment of their 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 are not making significant efforts, according to Reuters.
Both Cambodia and Thailand are among the countries that have applied for membership in the TPP, but their membership is still pending acceptance.
Last year, human rights experts criticized both the Cuba and Malaysia upgrades as unwarranted and potentially politicized in order to smooth the way to help accomplish the Obama administration’s goals. The TIP reports are the basis for U.S. policy in many countries and can lead to sanctions, so removing Cuba and Malaysia from the blacklist was seen as a necessary step to start lifting these economic penalties and launch new commercial ties.
Other upgrades that remained in place despite the internal agency disputes about them included China, India and Mexico.
Uzbekistan, one of the countries whose grade was internally disputed before it was improved last year, however, was downgraded in this year’s report to receive a Tier 3 grade, the rating for countries with the worst human-trafficking records.
Burma, also known as Myanmar, also was downgraded in an apparent attempt to persuade the country’s elected government, headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, and it’s military to curb use of child soldiers in forced labor, Reuters reported.
