A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee described how a key annual State Department human rights inquiry with broad implications may have been manipulated by political appointees.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) on Thursday detailed how the annual Trafficking In Persons (TIP) report–the subject of intense committee scrutiny since August–last year employed selective analyses in politically sensitive cases.
“You can’t say that certain things in that reporting period that happen to be good for that country would be included even though they’re not on the reporting period,” he said, “and certain things that are bad beyond the reporting period don’t get included.”
“I’m referring particularly to Malaysia and the mass graves that we found of the Rohingya,” Menendez added. “So that wasn’t considered, and what Malaysia was doing in that context but the passage of some law that wasn’t even yet enforced was considered.”
The State Department’s controversial “Tier 2” rating of Malaysia paved the way for it to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Congress excluded“Tier 3” countries from being eligible to join the free trade agreement when in June it passed Trade Promotion Authority “fast-track” legislation. The legislative branch is set to cast a final vote on the deal in the coming months.
Menendez made the remarks at the nomination hearing of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon.
Earlier this year, law enforcement officials in Malaysia found 139 mass graves that held the bodies of deceased migrant workers; victims of human traffickers.
Secretary of State John Kerry has said the Asian country received the upgrade because it ” has made significant efforts to comply with the minimum standards.”
Shannon, however, said Thursday that he was “committed to addressing the concerns of this committee.”
“It’s very worrisome for me that a report that should be a gold standard is seen as not being that,” he said.
In August, Reuters reported that TIP Studies on fourteen “strategically important countries” were influenced by administration officials. The wire service said that the “rejected recommendations suggests 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 after the article was published, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) held a hearing on the matter, where he described the administration’s defense of its report as “heartless.”
Corker then told the administration’s witness, Sarah Sewall, Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights, that he vowed to investigate.
“Any destruction of emails phone records or letters from 11:19 a.m. on could have significant consequences,” he stated, threatening to subpoena the Department.
In September, the committee probed the matter in a classified hearing with Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Days later, Corker said that three specific documents he had requested on the Department’s deliberative process had not been produced.
“I do hope they will provide that, like, now,” he remarked during committee proceedings. “This shouldn’t take any time to get to us.”
Shortly after that, seven House Democrats called on the State Department Inspector General to look into the affair. Reps. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), Alan Grayson (D-Florida), Brad Sherman (D-Calif), and Barbara Lee (D-Calif) noted, among other things, that in 2014, the TIP report “demoted Malaysia from the Tier 2 Watch List to Tier 3, among the worst offenders, after repeatedly failing to make progress on human trafficking enforcement and legislative efforts.”
Earlier this month, the environmentalist group Friends of the Earth filed a Freedom of Information Act request to force the State Department to disclose Sewall’s communications on Malaysia’s 2015 TIP ranking. It has been supported in its endeavor by human rights groups and major labor unions, including the AFL-CIO and the Communications Workers of America.
