As Reuters recently reported, top State Department officials, in order to reward Oman for its role as a mediator in U.S.-Iranian negotiations, ordered their subordinates to award the Gulf state with a higher-than-deserved grade in an annual report on human trafficking. Elliott Abrams comments:
[John] Kerry interfered in what is supposed to be, and almost always is, a fair and conscientious process. The damage is immense, and not only to the process by which the State Department makes judgments about the human-rights situation around the world—as Congress requires it do by law. The damage is not only to our country’s efforts to stop “trafficking in persons” and the terrible abuses that accompany that activity—efforts [which] have resulted in real achievements in many countries. . . .
[W]hat Kerry has done is to tell all human-rights abusers that our process is or can be fixed—if he cares enough to interfere. So, of course, it is logical that henceforth countries will be increasingly angry at our human-rights criticism, because they will no longer believe it is done out of conscience and cannot be changed by political pressure. The pressures to undermine the process will grow, [both] within the State Department and in foreign capitals. The department [produces] numerous congressionally-required human-rights reports, on religious freedom, trafficking in persons, women’s rights, and more. And all of them are now damaged.
Read more on Pressure Points: http://blogs.cfr.org/abrams/2015/12/21/kerrys-severe-damage-to-american-human-rights-policy