Gender Abuses Omitted in the 2024 US Human Rights Reports

VIEWPOINT, 10 September 2025

Winona Xu

Introduction: A narrowed human rights lens

The United States State Department has reported annually on the state of human rights around the world since Congress mandated it to in the 1970s. But this year’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, covering the events of 2024 and released in August of this year, have been drastically scaled down, effectively erasing a wide range of human rights concerns from the annual assessments.[1] Entire categories of government abuse and repression that were previously documented—from poor prison conditions and government corruption to violations of the freedom of peaceful assembly—have vanished.[2] Among the most alarming omissions, the new reports lack a separate section on women’s rights.[3] There is no reference to widely reported international violence and discrimination against women (such as sexual and reproductive violence) or to abuses against LGBTQ+ people. The introductory documents make no reference to discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.[4]

This is a radical departure from the traditionally broad coverage of the reports, constituting a policy shift with far-reaching legal and ethical consequences. Despite the anticipated revisions, in keeping with the Trump administration’s ideological attacks on international human rights institutions, the deliberate removal of gender-based abuses from the official assessment has been shocking.[5] This viewpoint argues that in excising gender-based abuses, the United States is contravening its international human rights obligations, violating the universality of human rights in favor of moral relativism.

Treaty obligations to gender equality and nondiscrimination

The United States is bound by international legal obligations to promote gender equality and counter gender-based human rights abuses. Such duties are overtly contradicted by the 2024 reports’ exclusions. Being a founding member of the United Nations (UN), the United States is obligated under the UN Charter to promote “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.”[6] Similarly, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and that everyone has the right to the declaration’s protections “without distinction of any kind, such as race [or] sex.”[7] While the declaration is non-binding, it was employed as a template for the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States became a party in 1992, making its provisions legally binding on US foreign policy. The United States committed itself to granting men and women alike all civil and political rights (article 3) and to ensuring equal protection of the law to all persons without distinction as to race, sex, language, religion, or any other status (article 26). These treaty commitments to ensuring and promoting women’s equal access to human rights are contradicted directly by the 2024 reports’ failure to acknowledge abuses targeting women and LGBTQ+ communities.

The United States is also a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).[8] Although the country has not ratified CEDAW, it is obligated under customary international law not to act against the object and purpose of the treaty. Additionally, the United States has long been supportive of CEDAW values and international women’s rights initiatives.[9] US delegations have historically participated in the Commission on the Status of Women’s annual sessions and backed their resolutions for international gender equality norms, which makes this year’s reversal all the more striking. At the commission’s March 2025 session, the US delegation broke with consensus in not approving the final conference declaration and in formally rejecting references to CEDAW and related gender equality policies.[10] US delegates dismissed gender quotas and climate policies as “globalist overreach” and argued that because the United States is not a CEDAW party, it is not subject to the treaty. This move—from the nation that famously once shouted “women’s rights are human rights” to the world—is a sign of broader regression in its commitments to women’s rights.[11] The omission of women’s and LGBTQ+ issues from the 2024 human rights reports is not a mistake but instead a deliberate policy choice counter to international legal obligations on human rights.

US treaty obligations also apply to legal protections for marginalized genders and sexual minorities. While no international treaty specifically for LGBTQ+ rights exists, sexual orientation and gender identity are included under the general principles of nondiscrimination and privacy.[12] The UN Human Rights Committee, responsible for administering the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, has consistently and clearly stated in landmark cases and general observations that states are obligated to protect against violence and discrimination on the grounds of gender.[13] Jurisprudence has interpreted protections of sexual orientation as falling within the state obligations regarding the rights to life, privacy, equality, and freedom from torture. There are other international mechanisms—including the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (which has also addressed intersecting discrimination against minority women) and Special Rapporteurs and working groups—that have shaped a strong body of standards enshrining women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights within the international human rights system.[14] By not reporting on abuses of gender-based violence, female genital mutilation, rape in conflict, or the persecution of LGBTQ+ people, the United States is undermining deeply rooted norms.

From the 1940s onward, the United States has formally stated that all human rights apply to all persons everywhere—a doctrine embedded in the UN Charter and reaffirmed in the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights.[15] The resulting Vienna Declaration of 1993, which the United States facilitated, proclaimed that “the universal nature of [human] rights and freedoms is beyond question” and that all rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated and to be dealt with “on the same footing, and with the same emphasis.” Most importantly, the Vienna Declaration categorically dismissed cultural and moral relativist claims by declaring that although national and regional diversities indeed exist, “it is the duty of States, irrespective of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.”[16]

Conclusion

This year’s human rights reports by the United States are weakening the principle that human rights are universal. Allies and adversaries alike may conclude that Washington will not pursue some human rights causes if they conflict with its immediate geostrategic interests or ideological inclinations.

More generally, these reports reveal growing tension between state discretion and international norms: however powerful a state, it cannot rewrite the definition of human rights unilaterally without damaging the legal framework it once espoused. Repairing the damage would require the United States to reassert the universality and indivisibility of human rights in doctrine and practice. In practice, this means restoring the excised sections on women’s rights, gender violence, and discrimination in future reports and ensuring that the reports resume coverage of all internationally recognized human rights issues, just as Congress mandated 50 years ago.

Winona Xu is a research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, United States.

Please address correspondence to the author. Email: winnieexu@g.ucla.edu

Competing interests: None declared.

Copyright © 2025 Xu. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

References

[1] “Key Issues Omitted in Revised US State Department Human Rights Report,” Al Jazeera (August 12, 2025), https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/12/us-state-department-issues-greatly-diminished-human-rights-report-2.

[2] Human Rights Watch, “US: Rights Report Mixes Facts, Deception, Political Spin” (August 12, 2025), https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/08/12/us-rights-report-mixes-facts-deception-political-spin; “Key Issues Omitted in Revised US State Department Human Rights Report” (see note 1); L. Robinson and N. James, “Women This Week: U.S. Department of State Removes Mention of Gender-Based Human Rights Abuses in Yearly Report,” Council on Foreign Relations (August 14, 2025), https://www.cfr.org/blog/women-week-us-department-state-removes-mention-gender-based-human-rights-abuses-yearly-report.

[3] Robinson and James (see note 2).

[4] K. LaRoque, “Assessing the Damage from Changes to the US State Department’s Human Rights Reports,” Freedom House (August 14, 2025), https://freedomhouse.org/article/assessing-damage-changes-us-state-departments-human-rights-reports.

[5] Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, “Trump Administration Civil and Human Rights Rollbacks,” https://civilrights.org/trump-rollbacks/.

[6] Charter of the United Nations (1945), art. 55(c); International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI) (1966), art. 3.

[7] Universal Declaration of Human Rights, G.A. Res. 217A (III) (1948), arts. 1–2.

[8] Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, General Recommendation No. 25 (2000); Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “About LGBTI People and Human Rights,” https://www.ohchr.org/en/sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity/about-lgbti-people-and-human-rights.

[9] UN Women, “Commission on the Status of Women | Outcomes,” https://www.unwomen.org/en/csw/outcomes.

[10] D. Bjerregaard, “How the U.S. Abandoned Women’s Rights at the UN—And What It Means for Global Gender Equality,” Women Against Violence Europe (April 8, 2025), https://wave-network.org/how-the-u-s-abandoned-womens-rights-at-the-un-and-what-it-means-for-global-gender-equality/.

[11] H. R. Clinton, “Remarks to the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women” (Beijing, September 5, 1995).

[12] Toonen v. Australia, Human Rights Committee, views of March 31, 1994, Comm. No. 488/1992, para. 8.7.

[13] Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 28, UN Doc. CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.10 (2000), paras. 8, 11; Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 36, UN Doc. CCPR/C/GC/36 (2018), para. 61.

[14] Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, General Recommendation No. 25 (see note 8); Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (see note 8).

[15] World Conference on Human Rights, Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, UN Doc. A/CONF.157/23 (1993), para. 18.

[16] Ibid., part I, para. 5.