State Dept. Watered Down Slavery Report

The State Department recently released its annual Trafficking in Persons report, which grades the world’s countries on human-rights records and delivers sanctions based on the judgment. According to a Reuters investigation, the human-rights experts charged with issuing the report were overruled by senior diplomats and forced to upgrade the rating of countries like Malaysia, Cuba (where trafficking had not improved), and China (where things had gotten worse). Of the 17 disputed countries, the expert analysts only won three times. A State Department spokesman denies the ratings were politicized.