ST. PAUL, Minn. — The Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) released this statement on reports about leaked chapters of the State Department’s 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, which indicate that the Trump administration is planning to remove or downplay reports of prisoner abuse and other widespread human rights violations:

“As described, the reports are wrong and dangerous in so many respects, most significantly the implication that only some people have fundamental human rights.

If the El Salvador chapter does in fact say that there were ‘no credible reports of significant human rights abuses’ in 2024, that’s laughable, and it facilitates the Trump administration playing a shell game with people’s lives. The administration has already knowingly transferred men to torture in El Salvador, after receiving clearly meritless assurances from the Salvadoran government that it would treat the men humanely. If the administration continues its illegal transfers to torture and other forms of persecution, to any country where it’s now whitewashed the country’s otherwise ghastly human rights record, it can, and no doubt will, point to the State Department’s own human rights reports to claim that the transfers are safe, and that any humane treatment promise from the receiving country is credible.

This kind of “nothing to see here” approach to gross human rights violations, from the United States, is how the global human rights architecture could begin to crumble.”

Scott Roehm, Director of Global Policy and Advocacy

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The Center for Victims of Torture is a nonprofit organization with offices in Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Uganda, United States and additional project sites around the world. Visit www.cvt.org