WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Several US politicians sharply criticized the Obama administration yesterday over an annual global report on human trafficking in response to a Reuters article chronicling how senior US diplomats had watered down rankings of more than a dozen strategically important countries.
Democratic Senator Bob Menendez called the account “alarming & unacceptable if true”, tweeting that “we must get to the bottom of this” at a Senate hearing set for Thursday to review the 2015 Trafficking in Persons report.
A Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen people in Washington and foreign capitals, showed that the State Department office set up to independently grade global efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 countries in this year’s report.
Among the countries that received higher rankings than recommended by the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons were Malaysia, Cuba, China, India, Uzbekistan and Mexico, the sources said.
“It’s shameful that President Obama allowed a bunch of political hacks to alter the administration’s human trafficking report to the benefit of perennial violators like Cuba and Malaysia,” said US Senator Marco Rubio, who is also a Republican presidential candidate.
Rubio called it a “dangerous precedent”. He sits along with Menendez on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which this week will question Sarah Sewall, who oversees the anti-trafficking office as Undersecretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights.
