How Human Rights Are Being Redefined in the Second Trump Administration
Since January 2025, the Trump Administration has not just sought to downplay or deprioritize human rights, but rather to redefine the concept completely.
Forgive me for sending out a non-Uruguay specific article, but I wanted to share the most recent piece I wrote for TIME Magazine on the history of the U.S. State Department Country Reports and how they are currently being used in the battle over redefining human rights. I first studied these reports for Of Light and Struggle because they were a critical tool that the Carter administration used to pressure Uruguay to improve its human practices. The reports pointed out the ways that the government continued to hold high levels of political prisoners and torture them, publicized this information, and used the reports as a justification for why it would not restore military funding to the government while it continued its repressive tactics.
Since the Carter administration, these reports have become even more important internationally. They’re increasingly used as a tool to pressure governments all over the globe to improve their practices, while advocacy organizations and lawyers also rely on them to aid in asylum cases and demonstrate fear of persecution.
Yet, the Trump Administration has indicated its pushing the normal publication date for these reports and that they are revising the ones that were drafted by Biden officials in late 2024. When they do release the reports, they will now exclude information on issues such as government efforts to deny freedom of movement and peaceful assembly, failures to retain or provide due process for political prisoners, and the harassment of human rights organizations. The Trump Administration has also signaled it will cut sections about the rights of women, the disabled, and the LGBTQ+ community.
By revising and cutting out substantial sections addressing an array of rights concerns that the U.S. has cared about for almost five decades, the Trump Administration is undermining the definition of human rights as a concept.
As I cover in the piece, Trump is hardly the first president to politicize his legal responsibility to Congress through its State Department reporting requirements. Debates about what and how much to include in these reports emerged in the first years of the legislative onus and has continued to varying degrees with presidents ever since. The difference today lays in the scope and scaling back of the current president’s vision of human rights.
If you are interested in the topic and the history of the reports, I’d be honored if you checked out this piece at TIME.
https://time.com/7280981/human-rights-country-reports/
