The State Department as hallway monitor
The knives are out between the U.S. State Department and the Government Accountability Office on the issue of human trafficking. The GAO recently released a report that casts doubt on the State Department's annual assessment of which countries are aiding the fight against trafficking and which countries are not. Some of the minimum standards are ...
The knives are out between the U.S. State Department and the Government Accountability Office on the issue of human trafficking. The GAO recently released a report that casts doubt on the State Department's annual assessment of which countries are aiding the fight against trafficking and which countries are not.
The knives are out between the U.S. State Department and the Government Accountability Office on the issue of human trafficking. The GAO recently released a report that casts doubt on the State Department's annual assessment of which countries are aiding the fight against trafficking and which countries are not.
Some of the minimum standards are subjective, and the report does not comprehensively explain how they were applied, lessening the report's credibility and hampering its usefulness as a diplomatic tool.
The report goes on to discuss the phenomenon of "horsetrading" within the State Department, as trafficking experts and diplomats negotiate over how to rank foreign governments.
…many disagreements over tier rankings are resolved by a process of "horsetrading", whereby the Trafficking Office agrees to raise some countries' tier rankings in exchange for lowering others. In these cases, political considerations may take precedence over a neutral assessment of foreign governments' compliance with minimum standards to combat trafficking.
None of this is particularly surprising. The State Department is, after all, a political organization, not a neutral human rights watchdog. Indeed, the GAO report leaves untouched the fundamental question of whether the Congresionally-mandated practice of ranking foreign countries for compliance with U.S. law makes sense. Every year, Congress requires the government to "certify" countries' cooperation in the drug war. Then there are the U.S. government's annual human rights reports and the list of states who sponsor terrorism. The ceaseless ranking and certification of other sovereign states generates understandable resentment abroad. It may be time to get the State Department out of the grading business and back to its core mission—diplomacy.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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