President Donald Trump joins authoritarian leaders like Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping in spreading hate and promoting regressive policies in 2017, Amnesty International’s annual human rights report determined.
The report looks at the human rights situation in 159 countries and territories throughout 2017, Trump’s first year in office.
“In the U.S.A., President Trump wasted little time in putting his anti-rights rhetoric of discrimination and xenophobia into action, threatening a major rollback on justice and freedoms—including by signing a series of repressive executive orders that threatened the human rights of millions, at home and abroad,” reads the report released Thursday by the human rights group.
The report details how the Trump administration oversaw and promoted abusive border enforcement practices and the detention of asylum-seekers on the U.S. border with Mexico.
And just in case you thought that Amnesty International was being completely unfair, get a load of this.
Courtesy of Politico:
State Department officials have been ordered to pare back passages in a soon-to-be-released annual report on global human rights that traditionally discuss women’s reproductive rights and discrimination, according to five former and current department officials.
The directive calls for stripping passages that describe societal views on family planning, including how much access women have to contraceptives and abortion.
A broader section that chronicles racial, ethnic and sexual discrimination has also been ordered pared down, the current and former officials said.
The move, believed to have been ordered by a top aide to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, reflects the Trump administration’s rightward turn from the Obama administration on family planning issues. It also appears to highlight the stated desire of Tillerson and President Donald Trump to make human rights a lower priority in U.S. foreign policy.
So yeah when a US report on human rights is stripped of language to identify abuses and protect human rights, I would suggest that we are no longer a leader in that endeavor.
Which I guess answers this question for a number of people in this country.
Source http://ift.tt/2sLZ0r5
