News: 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices

The U.S. Department of State released the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2020 earlier this week. The annual report provides overviews of human rights violations in some 200 countries and territories. More info is provided in the transcript of the Secretary of State's remarks. 

The State Dept. also announced that later in the year it would publish "an addendum to each 2020 country report that expands the subsection on women in Section 6, entitled 'Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons,' to include a broader range of issues related to reproductive rights," noting that "these topics were included in previous Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, and they will be included again in future years." 

More info on this addendum is provided in that Human Rights Watch news story. In addition, this Politico article describes how this year's reports "differ in both subtle and overt ways from versions published under then-President Donald Trump." A much more extensive assessment of the deficiencies in past Country Reports is presented in this Asylum Research Centre report.

Finally, more details on how the reports were compiled and the source materials used can be found in  Appendix A on the 2020 Country Reports page as well as ecoi.net's lengthy source description.