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US watered down trafficking report

Allege rights activists

REUTERS, Washington
In the weeks leading up to a critical annual US report on human trafficking that publicly shames the world's worst offenders, human rights experts at the State Department concluded that trafficking conditions hadn't improved in Malaysia and Cuba. And in China, they found, things had grown worse.
The State Department's senior political staff saw it differently — and they prevailed.
A Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington and foreign capitals,
shows that the government office set up to independently grade global efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior American diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 strategically important countries in this year'sTraffickingin Persons report.
In all, analysts in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons - or J/TIP, as it's known within the US government — disagreed with US diplomatic bureaus on ratings for 17 countries, the sources said.
The analysts, who are specialists in assessing efforts to combat modern slavery - such as the illegal trade in humans for forced labour or prostitution - won only three of those disputes, the worst ratio in the 15-year history of the unit, according to the sources.
As a result, not only Malaysia, Cuba and China, but countries such as India, Uzbekistan and Mexico, wound up with better grades than the State Department's human-rights experts wanted to give them, the sources said.
Of the three disputes J/TIP won, the most prominent was Thailand, which has faced scrutiny over forced labour at sea and the trafficking of Rohingya
Muslims through its southern jungles. Diplomats had sought to upgrade it to so-called "Tier 2 Watch List" status, it remains on “Tier 3" - the rating for countries with the worst humantrafficking records.
The number of rejected recommendations suggests a degree of intervention not previously known by diplomats in a report that can lead to sanctions and is the basis for many countries' anti-trafficking policies. This year, local embassies and other constituencies within the department were able to block some of the toughest grades.
State Department officials say the ratings are not politicised. "As is always the case, final decisions are reached only after rigorous analysis and discussion between the TIP office, relevant regional bureaus and senior State Department leaders," State Department spokesman John Kirby said in response to queries by Reuters.
Still, by the time the report was released on July 27, Malaysia and Cuba were both removed from the "Tier 3" blacklist, even though the State Department’s own trafficking experts believed neither had made notable improvements, according to the sources.
The Malaysian upgrade, which was highly criticized by human rights groups, could smooth the way for an ambitious proposed US-led free-trade deal with the Southeast Asian nation and 11 other countries.
Ending Communist-ruled Cuba's 12 years on the report's blacklist came as the two nations reopened embassies on each other's soil following their historic detente over the past eight months.
And for China, the experts' recommendation to downgrade it to the worst ranking, Tier 3, was overruled despite the report's conclusion that Beijing did not undertake increased anti-trafficking efforts.
That would have put China alongside the likes of Syria and North Korea, regarded by the United Nations as among the world’s worst human right abusers.
Typically, J/TIP wins more than half of what officials call “disputes" with diplomatic sections of the State Department, according to people familiar with the process.
"Certainly we have never seen that kind of an outcome," said one US official with direct knowledge of the department.