By Robbie Gramer and Vera Bergengruen

The State Department released a long-delayed human rights report highlighting the Trump administration's foreign policy priorities, escalating criticism of U.S. allies in Europe for perceived restrictions on freedom of expression while cutting sections on LGBTQ rights and government corruption.

Political appointees at the State Department changed how the report has traditionally been written and edited, current and former officials said, adding the administration's views on conditions in countries including Brazil and South Africa and tempering criticisms of El Salvador, a key partner in Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration.

The report "addresses abuses that had not previously been covered," State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said Tuesday.

Senior State Department officials said they restructured the report to be more readable, remove redundancies and align it closer with legislative guidelines. They stressed that they didn't shy away from outlining human-rights violations by Trump administration partners including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

By law, the reports are supposed to be issued by Feb. 25 each year. But fierce internal debates between political appointees at the State Department and career officials who pushed back on some edits delayed the release, current and former officials said.

The report is significantly shorter than in the past. The section on Russia, for example, has been cut by more than half, from 101 pages in the 2023 report to 41 pages in the new 2024 report.

Human-rights experts and former Biden administration officials criticized the changes that they said undermined the objectivity of a report that has been a mainstay of global human rights deliberations for nearly 50 years.

"The rewriting and gutting of these annual reports reflects this administration's abandonment of core values that are integral to U.S. national security and prosperity," said Uzra Zeya, a former senior human rights State Department official during the Biden administration.

U.S. lawmakers use the report to determine whether countries with documented human-rights abuses are eligible for U.S. assistance and military aid. Judges and lawyers in both the U.S. and other countries use it to assess asylum claims. U.S. embassies and nongovernment organizations cite the report in their work to hold foreign governments accountable.

The section of this year's report about the U.K. included detailed documentation of what it described as government violations of free speech, including an eight-week jail sentence for posting a meme linking migrants with knife crime, and limiting speech rights near "safe areas" such as abortion clinics. The latter point had been raised previously by Vice President JD Vance, who has condemned the U.K. for "criminalizing silent prayer."

The report trimmed denunciations of Trump allies including El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele, who the Biden administration criticized for human-rights abuses during a crackdown on gangs.

The report said there were "no credible reports of significant human rights abuses" in El Salvador last year. Local and international human rights groups say they have documented mass arbitrary detentions and group trials of up to 800 people, including minors, torture of prisoners and deaths in custody.

The Trump administration earlier this year deported more than 250 Venezuelan migrants from the U.S. to the Salvadoran prison where many of these abuses had allegedly occurred.

This year's report sharpened its criticism of countries that Trump has singled out as political or ideological adversaries. It accused South Africa of worsening abuses against white Afrikaners. The Trump administration has offered expedited refugee status to dozens of white South Africans while suspending refugee admissions for most of the world.

The report echoes Trump's portrayal of Brazil's court-ordered blocking of certain platforms and takedown of online content -- along with its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro -- as serious human rights abuses. Trump has called Bolsonaro's prosecution for an alleged 2022 coup plot a "witch hunt" and imposed 50% tariffs on the country.

Write to Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com and Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 12, 2025 15:20 ET (19:20 GMT)

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