Senators are preparing to grill State Department officials over a new report that accuses top agency brass of playing politics with its human trafficking upgrades of Cuba and Malaysia over career analysts’ recommendations.
“Alarming and unacceptable if true,” Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat and a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted Monday. “We must get to the bottom of this @ hearing on Thursday.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said there is no doubt in his mind that the rankings were politicized and slammed the administration for allowing a “bunch of political hacks” to taint the State Department’s report on human slavery and forced prostitution.
“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,” he said in a statement Monday night.
The president and his administration, he said, have “set a dangerous precedent that could lead countries to believe that they can negotiate their way out of being named and shamed for their human trafficking abuses, instead of actually adopting reforms and tackling the problem.”
Menendez and Rubio were referring to a Reuters report published late Monday afternoon that accused State Department senior political staff of repeatedly overruling seasoned agency analysts in their decisions on 17 countries’ reports, including the upgrades of Cuba and Malaysia.
Citing interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington and foreign capitals, the report says Malaysia and Cuba were both removed from the blacklist of worst offenders even though the State Department’s own trafficking experts believed neither had made notable improvements.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a hearing on the State Department’s 2015 TIP report Thursday. A House Foreign Affairs subcommittee also plans a hearing when Congress returns in September.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., authored the bill that called for the creation of the annual Trafficking in Persons, or TIP, report and the 50-person State Department office charged with producing it.
“For political reasons alone, President Obama has done a grave disservice to victims of human trafficking in Cuba and Malaysia by upgrading the human trafficking tier rankings in those countries …” he said when the report was issued early last week.
Sarah Sewell, the under secretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights, will appear before the Senate panel Thursday to face intense questioning over the charges that senior State Department officials politicized the report, several Congressional sources tell the Washington Examiner.
Sewell vigorously defended the final rankings July 27, the day the State Department released the annual TIP report.
“No, no, no,” Sewell responded when reporters asked her whether Malaysia was upgraded to help smooth the path for trade negotiations.
Human rights groups were especially upset over the improved rating for Malaysia and accused the administration of improving the country’s score to order to help facilitate a major trade deal between more than a dozen Pacific-Rim countries and the United States.
Menendez threatened to call for an inspector general to investigate why officials removed Malaysia from the lowest Tier 3 rank to the Tier 2 watch list.
The upgrade immediately raised suspicion in a year which Malaysian authorities discovered dozens of suspected mass migrant graves and human rights groups reported continued forced labor in the nation’s palm oil, construction and electronics industries, Reuters reported.
The analysts and State Department senior political officials also locked horns over Cuba’s record, with the analysts arguing that giving Havana an unearned upgrade during the administration’s attempt to renew ties with the island nation could seriously damage the integrity of the report.
The two sides also clashed over China’s ranking. Analysts in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, or J/TIP, called for downgrading China to a Tier 3 for failing to abide by a promise to get rid of its “re-education through labor” system and its failure to protect trafficking victims from other countries, such as North Korea. The final report, however, lists China as a Tier 2 Watch List country.
In addition, India, Uzbekistan and Mexico also ended up with better rankings than State Department human-rights experts wanted to give them, Reuters reported.
