State Dept. on Missing Legal Deadline for Human Rights Reports by 120 Days: 'No Big Deal'
By Brittany M. Hughes | June 25, 2015 | 4:32 PM EDT
(CNSNews.com) -- When asked during a press briefing on Thursday why the State Department waited until 120 days past the statutorialy mandated deadline to release its annual 2014 Human Rights Reports, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Tom Malinowski said he and Secretary of State John Kerry simply “decided that we wanted to release the reports at a time we would both be here to do it,” adding it was “no big deal” to postpone the report’s release well past the congressionally mandated deadline.
Malinowski also admitted that the reports have sat completed but unreleased at the State Department for at least three months.
At the beginning of the briefing, a reporter asked Malinowski, “Why was the report so late this year? I mean, the conspiracy theories are fast and furious out there. I’ve heard three myself that I’ll just mention real quickly -- that it had something to do with the trade promotion authority, or it had to do with the strategic and economic dialogue that were completed yesterday with China, or the Iran talks.”
Malinowski said, “At the outset of this process, we decided, the secretary and I decided, that we wanted to release the reports at a time we would both be here to do it. And that is admittedly not a requirement, but it’s something that we felt was important to demonstrate our commitment, his commitment, to this issue.”
“So what happened was, with that in mind, we scheduled it for a date first back in March,” said Malinowski. “His travel schedule changed. We scheduled it for another date. It changed. At that point, I canceled the date that we had because I decided I wanted to go to Burundi to deal with the crisis there.”
“Each time it was, ‘Well, no big deal because we’ll do it next week. We’ll do it next week.’ And then the secretary had his injury, which obviously, you know, affected his ability to come down here and to do it,” Malinowski continued.
“The result was a delay that was far longer than any of us wanted,” he said. “None of us were happy with it. But I think it’s fairly clear, given what’s happened this week and where the secretary is going next week, that it had nothing to do with some of the issues that you mentioned.”
At exactly four months to the day past the federally mandated deadline of Feb. 25, this is the latest the State Department has ever released its Human Rights Reports since it first began publishing them at the direction of Congress in 1977.
The annual reports were first published in 1977 under a legal mandate included in the 1976 International Security and Arms Export Control Act. According to the law as originally enacted, the reports were supposed to detail the human rights abuses in nations receiving security assistance from the United States so that members of Congress would be better informed about the nature of the governments that were receiving this type of aid.
Sec. 301 of the initial 1976 law stated: “The Secretary of State shall transmit to the Congress, as part of the presentation materials for security assistance programs proposed for each fiscal year a full and complete report, prepared with the assistance of the Coordinator for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, with respect to practices regarding the observance of and respect for internationally recognized human rights in each country proposed as a recipient of security assistance.”
The law was later expanded to include all members of the United Nations, as well as countries receiving “economic” assistance from the United States.
The original provision did not set a specific deadline for the report. But the first Human Rights Reports, covering 82 countries, were released in March 1977.
On Aug. 3, 1977, the Foreign Assistance Act was amended to include a Jan. 31 deadline for the State Department to submit the annual Human Rights Reports to Congress. The amendment specified that the reports were to be sent to the Speaker of the House and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In that pre-internet era, the department would often submit the report in print to Congress by the Jan. 31 deadline and then release a public printing of it in February.
From 1978 to 1997, the State Department failed to submit the human rights reports to Congress by the Jan. 31 deadline only once. That was in 1996, when the State Department under then-President Bill Clinton, submitted the report 34 days late on March 5.
In 1998, Congress changed the statutory deadline for the reports from Jan. 31 to Feb. 25.
In the 17 years since 1998, the State Department has been late in releasing the human rights reports 12 times.
Under former President George W. Bush, the Human Rights Reports were released past the federally mandated deadline six times. The latest the Bush administration ever released the reports was in 2003, when they were published 34 days late on March 31.
In the seven years President Obama’s State Department has been responsible for releasing the reports, the department has released the Human Rights Report by the Feb. 25 only one time, in 2009. That was just one month after Obama took office and his administration took control of the State Department.
In every year since then, the State Department has been late in releasing the human rights reports.
Prior to this year, 2012 was the latest the department ever released the reports. That year, under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the department released the reports on May 24--89 days past the statutory deadline.
Last year, the administration released the reports on Feb. 27—only two days past the deadline.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/brittany-m-hughes/state-dept-missing-legal-deadline-human-rights-reports-120-days-no
