The State Department on Thursday released an influential but embattled annual paper on human trafficking.
The Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report this year has thus far brought fewer points of contention than it eventually did in 2015. Notable changes in the latest report include an upgrade for Thailand and a downgrade for Myanmar.
Thailand was moved to “tier 2” after its government promised to reform laws and crack down on forced labor in the seafood industry. Myanmar was moved to “tier 3” because of its reported failure to stop the use of child soldiers in its armed forces.
“There are some tough calls,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday morning. “Some of them come down to an element of discretion, but not much.”
Kerry later claimed the tier rankings “don’t take into account political and other factors.”
“We have a fixed set of rules that Congress has created and we follow those rules,” he also said.
Some observers have already questioned the Thailand designation, especially with the country under military rule since 2014. But when TIP came out last year, the condemnations of the report were much more prominent and swift. Lawmakers charged that its rankings were politically manipulated to serve the Obama administration’s foreign policy agenda.
Weeks before its release, Congress had passed legislation stopping the administration from negotiating trade deals with tier 3 countries—a statute that threatened Malaysia’s status within then-ongoing Trans Pacific Partnership talks.
“If the president relaxes or un-designates Malaysia as a tier three designation, it would be a tragedy,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) had said in May 2015. When the Southeast Asian country was upgraded to tier 3, outrage followed.
The anger was stoked by a Reuters report, published days after the TIP release. The investigation found career diplomats were overruled by political appointees in designations impacting fourteen “strategically important countries,” including Malaysia.
The vetoes, the wire service said, were unprecedented, suggesting “a degree of intervention not previously known by diplomats in a report that can lead to sanctions and is the basis for many countries’ anti-trafficking policies.”
Days later, Sarah Sewall, an Undersecretary of State overseeing TIP, defended the report before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Its chair, Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), called the testimony “heartless.”
Corker then threatened to subpoena the State Department over the tier-ranking deliberative process, after Sewall refused to testify about the matter in a non-classified setting.
“Any destruction of emails phone records or letters from 11:19 a.m. on could have significant consequences,” he stated.
The move was backed by Democrats on the committee, including Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). Menendez had authored the proposal exempting tier 3 countries from the TPP.
“I would urge the committee to seek all of the documentation that was created in the context of devising this year’s report,” Menendez said.
As of March 2016, however, a handful lawmakers in the House were still pushing for details about the deliberative process to be released.
“A recommendation was made and obviously those split memos would give us real insight form the State Department on why those decisions [were made] and who made those decisions,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.).
Last month, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on this year’s TIP report. The panel featured testimony from five State Department officials. The press and members of the public were not allowed to attend.
