WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – A U.S. Senate committee demanded yesterday that the State Department hand over all the documents used to rank countries in its annual human trafficking report, as lawmakers expressed concern it had been watered down for political reasons.
Senator Bob Corker, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations panel, issued the order as members grilled a senior State Department official over whether politics trumped human rights in the higher grades given this year to strategically important countries such as Malaysia and Cuba.
The contentious hearing followed a Reuters examination that showed the State Department office set up to independently rate countries’ efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior U.S. diplomats.
Testifying before the committee, Undersecretary of State Sarah Sewall defended the Obama administration under questioning about the 2015 Trafficking in Persons report published on July 27. Over the objections of the State Department’s own experts, Malaysia and Cuba were among countries upgraded from the blacklist of worst offenders on human trafficking.
Corker threatened a congressional subpoena if all documents, including emails, memos and telephone records, were not provided and vowed “significant consequences” if any materials were destroyed.
Asserting that many of the rankings appeared to be “the result of external pressure,” Democratic Senator Bob Menendez raised the prospect of calling for an inspector general’s investigation.
“If it is true that the administration politicized this report, there are questions about why they chose to significantly diminish a tool that has been effective in fighting slavery around the world,” Corker said, expressing concern that the ranking process had “run amok.”
Sewall, who oversees the U.S. Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons as undersecretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights, reiterated State Department denials of political interference and insisted that the report was something “all Americans can be very proud of.”
“The rigorous and comprehensive annual assessment process is what makes the TIP report the gold standard in anti-trafficking efforts,” she said.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner later said: “We continue to stand by the process for determining the rankings that go into the report.”