Senior US lawmakers expressed concern on Tuesday about whether the State Department's annual global report on human trafficking may have been watered down due to political considerations and vowed to demand a full accounting at a Senate hearing this week.
Human rights groups called for an investigation into why strategically important countries such as Malaysia and Cuba were upgraded from the list of worst offenders in human trafficking, after a Reuters article chronicled how senior US diplomats repeatedly overruled State Department human rights experts...
Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, who also sits on the panel said: "If true, the Reuters report further confirms what I, along with the human rights community, have feared all along: The State Department's trafficking report has been blatantly and intentionally politicised."
Lawmakers will question Sarah Sewall, who oversees the anti-trafficking office as undersecretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights.
A Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington and foreign capitals, showed that the State Department office set up to independently grade global efforts to fight human trafficking was pressured into inflating assessments of 14 countries in this year's report.
...Continue reading article here.
