State Department’s 2024 human rights report could jeopardize LGBTQ asylum cases

Advocacy groups on Tuesday pointedly criticised the removal of LGBTQ-specific references from the State Department’s 2024 human rights report.

The report, released Tuesday by the State Department, does not mention Uganda’s anti-homosexuality law and the impact it has had on the country’s LGBTQ community since President Yoweri Museveni signed it in 2023. However, the report reportedly states that Ugandan government officials committed acts of sexual violence.”

“The NGO reported that at least 15 police medical staff had submitted at least 15 forced anal examinations after their arrest.” I’ll read it. “Opinion protesters said security forces threatened to use forced anal tests during interrogation.”

Uganda is one of dozens of countries where consensual same-sex sexual relations remain criminalised. Authorities in African countries often use so-called anal examinations to determine whether someone is engaged in homosexuality.

The report does not mention that Brazil has the highest number of reported murders of transgender people in the world. But that is Notes In 2024, President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva was deemed “democracy” and often guaranteed a secret process by disproportionately suppressing the speeches of former President Gea Bolsonaro and his supporters of journalists and elected politicians.

The report is there “There were no reliable reports of serious human rights abuse.” In Hungary in 2024, Prime Minister Victor Orban’s government continued to crack down on anti-LGBTQ rights. This report warned Russian authorities last year. “It called laws prohibiting the distribution of ‘propaganda against non-traditional sexual relations’ with children. ”

State Department’s 2023 Human Rights Report Note Russian law “prohibits gender transition procedures and provides gender-affirming care. Authorities used laws prohibiting the promotion of “non-traditional sexual relations” to justify arbitrary arrests of LGBTQI+. The 2023 report also reported that “state actors committed violence against LGBTQI+ individuals based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, particularly in Chechnya,” and that “government agents attacked, harassed and threatened LGBTQI+ activists.”

“There are times when violence by non-state actors targeting LGBTQI+ people and often times they have not been able to properly respond to such incidents,” he adds.

The 2024 report does not mention Thai lawmakers approved a bill last year extending marriage rights to same-sex couples. Gays and lesbians began legally getting married in the country in January.

During a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, Jessica Stern, a former special envoy for promoting LGBTQ and intersex rights under the Biden Harris administration, who co-founded the Alliance of Diplomacy and Justice, said during a conference call with her and her colleagues, “we expect the (report) to be bad.”

“When we saw what the administration announced, the truth is that we were shocked and terrified,” Stern said.

Stern said the Trump Vance administration has “eliminated or watered down the entire category of abuse against people of African descent, Indigenous people, Roman people, other marginalized racial and ethnic communities, workers, women, girls, and LGBTQI+ people.”

“It’s an intentional elimination,” Stern said.

The Global Equality Council of Statement condemned the “dramatic restructuring and obvious omission of violence and abuse targeting lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+).

“We condemn the Trump administration’s efforts to politicize the State Department’s annual human rights report by stripping long-standing references to human rights abuses targeting LGBTQI+ and other marginalized groups,” said group co-chairman Mark Bromley.

Mark Takano (D-Calif), a gay US lawmaker who chairs Congressional Equality Caucus, repeated Bromley and Stern.

“Omitting the persecution of LGBTQI+ people from human rights reports will not erase the abuse, violence and criminalization that our communities face all over the world.

“Erasing communities from these reports will make it much more difficult for human rights advocates, the media and Americans to recognize the global face of LGBTQI+ people,” he added.

Congress requires the State Department to publish its human rights report annually. The bottom of the mist usually releases it in the spring.

Politico in March reported that the Trump Vance administration had planned to cut sections such as women, disabled people, and the LGBTQ+ community from its human rights report. State Department spokesman Tammy Bruce defended the report at its final press conference on Tuesday, defending the delay in releasing it.

“We weren’t going to release anything edited and written by the previous administration,” Bruce said. “We had to change based on our perspective and the vision of the Trump administration. So these changes were made.”

“Like our work, it certainly promotes respect for human rights around the world.” “Gay woman.”

The Council of Global Equality and Democracy has filed a Freedom of Information Act law suit. The press release states that “seek for the release of additional information… strips the report of references to abuses against LGBTQI+ people, including instructions provided by political appointees.”

“This report will render LGBTQI+ people and other minorities in sight, and in doing so they undermine the human rights situation that protects us all,” Bromley said.

“Erasing communities from these reports will make it much more difficult for human rights advocates, the media and Americans to recognize the global face of LGBTQI+ people,” Takano added. “Unable to correct this censorship will have realistic and potentially fatal consequences for LGBTQI+ people, including both those traveling abroad from the US and those in countries where leadership no longer needs to worry about the consequences of human rights abuse.

A State Department spokesman told the Washington Blade: “The information contained in the 2024 report will be reconstructed to implement improved utility and accessibility and to respond more sensitively to the legislative mission of the (human rights report).

“The results are laid out in the law, while also being more streamlined, objective, universal, and addressing reporting requirements directly so that they are accessible to Americans,” the spokesman said.

The spokesman declined to comment on the FOIA lawsuit filed by the Council for Global Equality and Democratic Forward.