US Guts Criticism of Indigenous Rights Abuses, Mentions of Climate Change From Annual Human Rights Reports – Inside Climate News

Forget Indigenous rights, climate change and environmental protection. That’s the stark message from the latest edition of the U.S. Department of State’s reports on human rights practices across the world, according to an Inside Climate News analysis.

The 196 country reports released Tuesday—relied on by businesses, lawmakers, courts, civil society, diplomats and others—cover issues during 2024, the final year of the Biden administration. But they bear heavy fingerprints from officials working to further the agenda of President Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio. 

The reports were extensively reworked to reflect the Trump administration’s priorities, which explains their late arrival. For the previous eight years, the reports were released in March or April. They have also been scaled back to about one-third of the length of the reports for 2023, released last year.

The ICN analysis, which considered the rate of mentions of specific terms per 100,000 words, to control for the brevity of the new reports, found that mentions of “Indigenous” were down 84 percent from the prior eight-year average, with sections addressing alleged abuses against Indigenous peoples entirely removed from the reports.

Those sections had emphasized credible allegations that some governments were failing to formally consult Indigenous communities about extractive projects—like oil, gas and mining—that affect them. The sections had also highlighted how land invasions and other illegal activities like logging affect Indigenous communities, as well as the extreme danger Indigenous land defenders face for peacefully resisting environmental destruction. 

The report for 2023 on Honduras, released by the Biden administration, said that violence against Indigenous peoples and other environmental defenders “was often rooted in a broader context of conflict regarding land and natural resources, corruption, lack of transparency and community consultation, other criminal activity, and limited state ability to protect the rights of vulnerable communities.”

Inside Climate News’ analysis found mentions of corruption, which often goes hand-in-hand with environmental degradation, are down by around 80 percent in the new reports from the prior eight-year average.

The annual State Department reports have historically been the largest and most comprehensive summary of human rights issues worldwide. They played an especially important role for human rights defenders living and working in authoritarian countries or in places where access to information is limited, former State Department employees say. 

Many environmental defenders, particularly Indigenous people, operate in remote areas with little government support. The State Department reports previously drew attention to abuses those groups face.  

Differences between the last two years of reports on Brazil illustrate how the Trump administration is overhauling the U.S. approach to these issues. The 2023 report released by the Biden administration noted that violence against Indigenous peoples in Brazil rose during the four-year presidency of Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, with an average of 374 violent attacks each year. 

The new Brazil report for 2024 omits any mention of “Indigenous peoples” and says the left-wing Brazilian government now in charge has disproportionately suppressed the speech of Bolsonaro supporters. Trump recently criticized as “serious human rights abuses” the charges against Bolsonaro and some of his supporters for trying to overturn the 2022 presidential election. 

Edson Krenak, advocacy coordinator for the Indigenous-rights group Cultural Survival, said in a written statement that the new reports undermine Indigenous peoples’ “struggles for sovereignty and justice – deep democratic values.”

“This erasure is especially troubling given the well-documented role of U.S. corporations in driving Indigenous Peoples land dispossession, environmental destruction, and human rights violations through extractive industries and opaque global supply chains,” he added.

Introductory remarks to the reports released last year by the Biden administration underscored the focus on human rights defenders, which include environmental defenders: “As in 2022, there is attention to reporting threats and violence against human rights defenders, particularly those exercising their civil and political rights to advocate for the environment and land as well as for Indigenous peoples’ rights.” The Trump administration’s remarks this year mention human rights defenders but are silent on environmental defenders and issues. 

The State Department did not respond to specific questions from Inside Climate News about the new reports’ scaled-back coverage of Indigenous peoples and environmental issues, including climate change. 

But an agency spokesperson provided a written statement saying the new reports remove redundancy and improve readability. They’re a response to what Congress originally mandated for the reports, the statement added, “rather than an expansive list of politically biased demands and assertions.” 

“The Human Rights Report only makes the United States—and the world—safer, stronger, and more prosperous if individual reports are useful, factual, and unclouded by political biases and cherry-picking,” the statement said. “This year’s revised individual reports are a welcome step in that direction.”

Michael Posner, who oversaw the production of the country reports on human rights practices from 2009 to 2013, said the new reports have “more cherry-picking and increased political intrusion into what has been a professional process, resulting in reports that are less factually credible or useful.”

“The outcome will be that people around the world will view these reports as politically charged documents that lack the rigor and comprehensiveness of those that came before,” he added. 

Rubio dismantled the office Posner used to lead, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, part of the sweeping reorganization of the department that laid off hundreds of officials. 

Desirée Cormier Smith, who served as special representative for racial equity and justice in that office until she resigned in January, said the reports are typically completed by the end of each calendar year, with some adjustments made before their release the following spring. This year’s draft reports, she said, had included sections on Indigenous peoples, women, LGBTQI+ people and racial and ethnic discrimination. Those sections were deleted, she said. 

“It’s so deeply offensive and shocking to the conscience that this administration would attempt to erase the very people who tend to be the most vulnerable and those who are most frequently denied their human rights,” Cormier Smith said, noting that Indigenous peoples are often on the front lines of the impacts of climate change.

Mary Lawlor, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights defenders, said she was “appalled” that the State Department appeared to scale back reporting on attacks and killings of environmental human rights defenders. She noted that more than 320 human rights defenders were killed last year, the majority of whom were focused on environmental protection. 

“As the destruction of the environment worsens and the climate crisis is ever present, it is shocking that the U.S. seeks to ignore these courageous people,” Lawlor said. 

While the phrase “climate change” was never a dominant theme in the State Department’s human rights reports, it appeared four times in the 2023 reports. The term appeared in discussions of wildfires in Algeria, drought and the movement of livestock for grazing in Chad, internal displacement of people in Guatemala and threats made against activists who raised the issue in Iraq. In the new reports for 2024, “climate change” doesn’t get a single mention.

The omission is evidence of a widening gap between the United States and the rest of the world, as well as with the scientific community, on how climate change is impacting human rights. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of hundreds of scientists from across the world, has reported that climate change intensifies droughts, floods and other extreme weather events, worsening water and food insecurity, displacing communities and harming human health. Those findings are echoed by human rights experts, medical doctors, multiple courts and other experts. 

Climate change also exacerbates existing vulnerabilities of certain groups, including children and women. Inside Climate News’ analysis found the reports’ mentions of “women” are down by about 75 percent from the prior eight-year average, “gender” is down by more than 96 percent and “LGBT” is down by more than 99.9 percent. 

In July, the International Court of Justice, reviewing more than a dozen international laws and treaties and the findings of leading scientists, called climate change an “urgent and existential threat” and said governments have legal obligations under human rights laws to address it.

“The environment is the foundation for human life, upon which the health and well-being of both present and future generations depend,” the court said, noting that the impacts of climate change can impair the right to life. 

While estimates vary, a World Health Organization analysis found climate change is expected to contribute to an additional 250,000 deaths annually from 2030 to 2050. 

The State Department’s written statement said, “The Trump Administration, both President Trump and Secretary Rubio, have been leading efforts on the most important human right, which is the right to life, including leading on ceasefire signings and treaties, and multiple other avenues, demonstrating the administration’s commitment to human rights.”

Other changes made to the reports include reduced criticism of the human rights record of Trump administration allies, including El Salvador and Israel. 

Climate’s Impact on Human Rights

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director for energy, climate and environment at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank widely seen as influencing Trump administration policy, said Trump believes the burning of fossil fuels improves human rights around the world because energy access alleviates poverty. 

“The administration doesn’t believe that there is a link between CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions and the environment,” Furchtgott-Roth added, citing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s determination, under Trump, that climate-warming gases do not harm public health. 

Top climate scientists have called the finding and a related report issued by the Trump administration “deceptive,” “cherry-picked” and “antiscientific.” That report seeks to argue that climate change is “less damaging” than previously believed. In fact, multiple peer-reviewed studies by scientists show climate impacts are worsening as greenhouse gases keep altering the conditions that people’s property, businesses and lives depend on. 

“To not account for these major changes and the impacts they can have on communities or a country’s stability is to miss a significant human rights risk,” said Kirk Herbertson, U.S. director of advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International. “It can upend the political and social order.” 

Herbertson said the Biden administration integrated climate change considerations into its decision-making across government, including in the State Department reports, “because it was a highly relevant amplifier of existing threats and issues that the U.S. government cares about.” 

Congress tasked the State Department with creating annual human rights reports in the mid-1970s. The goal was to provide lawmakers with information on countries’ human rights records to guide decisions regarding trade and foreign aid. Part of the thinking was that taxpayers shouldn’t fund initiatives with or in countries that don’t respect human rights. 

Today, the reports are widely used by immigration judges considering asylum claims, businesses making investment decisions, activists and others. 

“The rationale for creating these reports in the 1970s still makes sense today,” said Posner, the former State Department official. “To me, it is a grand abandonment of responsibility by the federal government to dismantle these reports in the way they have done.”