Special Report: State Department watered down human trafficking report
Source: Reuters
In the weeks leading up to a critical annual U.S. 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’s Trafficking in Persons report.
In all, analysts in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons - or J/TIP, as it’s known within the U.S. government — disagreed with U.S. diplomatic bureaus on ratings for 17 countries, the sources said.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/03/us-usa-humantrafficking-disputes-special-idUSKCN0Q821Y20150803
Note: Long article.
= new reply since forum marked as read
it shouldn't be too surprising that our culture doesn't take human slavery as seriously as it should. But it's still outrageous to me. 
K&R
