“A bill to safeguard the integrity of the Department of State's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, and for other purposes.”
No CRS summary available for this bill.
This section states congressional findings on global threats to human rights from democratic backsliding, authoritarianism, and armed conflict; the importance of the Department of State's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices as a factual tool for activists, journalists, scholars, and governments; the risks of politically tailoring the reports; and the need for comprehensive reporting on all internationally recognized human rights to maintain credibility and accountability.
This section declares it to be the policy of the United States (1) to reaffirm the commitment to promote observance of internationally recognized human rights by all countries as a principal goal of U.S. foreign policy; (2) to regularly engage with human rights defenders, journalists, democracy advocates, victims of human rights violations, and other stakeholders to gather information for inclusion in the annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (i.e., Human Rights Reports required by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961); and (3) to publish credible, fact-based Human Rights Reports on an annual basis that cover the full scope of internationally recognized human rights, as required by law, and are devoid of political favoritism or targeting.
This section expands the required contents of the Department of State's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices under the Foreign Assistance Act (i.e., descriptions of human rights conditions in countries receiving U.S. assistance to inform aid eligibility decisions) as follows: (1) in paragraph (2), adding involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices and discrimination against people accessing maternal, sexual, and reproductive health care, including obstetric violence, involuntary or coerced abortion, involuntary or coerced pregnancy, and coerced sterilization (replacing "and involuntary sterilization"); (2) in paragraph (5), adding whether countries facilitate refoulement (i.e., return of persons to face torture or persecution); (3) making conforming punctuation changes in paragraph (11)(C); (4) in paragraph (12), inserting multiple references to freedom of expression alongside press freedom, replacing "and censorship" with "censorship and restrictions on internet freedom or access to information," and making related conforming edits; (5) in paragraph (13), adding harassment or punishment of family members for relatives' alleged offenses (new subparagraph (B)), with redesignations and conforming edits; and (6) adding new paragraphs (14) through (20) on restrictions on freedom of movement; laws or practices creating statelessness or discriminating against internally displaced persons; arbitrary privacy interference; limits on political participation, assembly, association, and civic space; government corruption's human rights impacts; discrimination or violence against specified groups (e.g., women and girls, LGBTQI+ individuals); and factors undermining judicial independence, due process, fair trials, and prison conditions.