The Trump administration is lashing out at China, Iran, Russia and North Korea for being “forces of instability” because of human rights abuses of their own citizens and others.

In its annual global human rights reports released on Friday, the State Department singled out the four countries for egregious rights violations, including restricting the freedoms of speech and assembly and allowing or committing violence against religious, ethnic and other minority groups. It said that countries that undermine the fundamental dignity of people are “morally reprehensible” and harm U.S. interests.

“The governments of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, for example, violate the human rights of those within their borders on a daily basis and are forces of instability as a result,” acting Secretary of State John Sullivan said in an introduction to the reports — one for each country and territory in the world. He said the U.S. aims to lead by example and promotes good governance, anti-corruption efforts and the rule of law.

In addition to harshly criticizing those countries by name, the reports, which covers 2017 and is the first entirely produced by the Trump administration, replaces sections on “reproductive rights” with one titled “coercion in population control.” The shift underscores the Trump administration’s anti-abortion position that has already manifested itself in funding for international health programs and has been criticized by women’s health advocates. 

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had added the “reproductive rights” section in 2012 and it had remained a part of each country’s report until this year. Beyond coercion, that section had previously called out countries that denied access to information and services for reproductive health, including contraception.

Traditional U.S. adversaries are hit hardest in the report. The entries for China, Iran, Russia and North Korea outline a litany of abuses blamed on their governments, which are also accused of failing to hold human rights violators accountable for their actions:

China

The report said Beijing is responsible for arbitrary detentions, executions without due process and coerced confessions of prisoners as well as forced disappearances and “significant restrictions” on freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, and movement.

In the “coercion in population control” section, the report says that China enforces “a coercive birth-limitation policy that in some cases included sterilization or abortions. In its first year in office, the Trump administration, as previous Republican administrations have done, pulled funding from the U.N. Population Fund, largely because of its work in China. The fund denies that it promotes abortion.

“China continues to spread the worst features of its authoritarian system,” Sullivan told reporters on Friday.

Iran

The theocratic Shiite government in Iran is responsible for executing “a high number” of prisoners for crimes that don’t merit the death penalty, the report said, along with torture, jailing of dissidents, severe curbs on journalists, gays and religious minorities. It also accused Iran of taking few steps to investigate, prosecute or punish any officials who committed the abuses, citing a widespread pattern of impunity for offenders.

In addition, it said that through its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government and Iraqi Shia militias, Iran “materially contributed” to rights abuses in Syria and Iraq.

Russia

Moscow was lambasted in the report for allowing a “climate of impunity” for human rights abuses and doing little to punish officials who violate basic rights. The report laments Russia’s “authoritarian political system dominated by President Vladimir Putin,” in contrast with Trump’s reluctance to criticize Putin or the Kremlin directly.

The list of alleged transgressions by Russia is long. The report alleged that Russia allows “systematic” torture that sometimes leads to death, along with extrajudicial killings of gay people in Chechnya, which prompted U.S. sanctions late last year under a human rights law. Russia’s “lack of judicial independence,” crackdowns on journalists and political dissidents, and censorship on the internet and of foreign organizations was also sharply criticized.

North Korea

 Ahead of an anticipated historic meeting in the coming weeks between Trump and leader Kim Jong Un, the report accused North Korea of “egregious human rights violations” in nearly all of the categories included in the report. Forced labor, torture, coerced abortion and arbitrary arrests are all noted in the report, which also slams North Korea for extrajudicial killings, rigid controls over citizens’ private lives and the use of political prison camps. 

The report says that “impunity” for those offenses continues to be a problem in North Korea.

Syria

President Bashar Assad’s government is accused of widespread atrocities, including chemical weapons attacks on civilians using sarin and chlorine _ two agents the U.S. has said were used in this month’s attack near Damascus that led the U.S., France and the U.K. to launch airstrikes. The report also accused Assad’s government of starving civilians, thousands of cases of torture,'' attacking hospitals and raping childrenas a weapon of war.”

Saudi Arabia

Despite the harsh tone toward Iran, the report for Saudi Arabia — another country run under a strict version of Islamic law — is more measured. It notes without comment abuses that are similar to those in Iran, including unwarranted executions, the lack of free and fair elections and discrimination against women and homosexuals.

The report offers only mild criticism over the kingdom’s military intervention in Yemen’s civil war, which has long been blamed for high numbers of civilian casualties.
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Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said that President Vladimir Putin is willing to accept U.S. President Donald Trump’s invitation to meet in Washington.

In an interview with state-operated RIA Novosti news agency, Lavrov said that Putin is “ready for such a meeting.”

“We are guided by the fact that the U.S. President, in a telephone conversation – which is a known fact already, there is no secret – extended such an invitation and said he would be happy to see [Putin] in the White House.”

Lavrov added that Trump returned to the subject of the invitation a couple of times during the phone call with Putin and told him he would be happy to make a reciprocal visit to Russia.

Earlier Trump and Putin agreed on a possible summit in Washington.

Trump telephoned Putin on March 20 to congratulate him on winning the Russian presidential election two days earlier.

The White House and the Kremlin said at the time the two presidents discussed the possibility of meeting in person.
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The case of Edgardo Mortara has roiled Catholic-Jewish relations ever since the 6-year-old Jewish boy was taken from his home in Bologna by papal police in 1858 and brought to Rome to be raised a Catholic. The move was ordered after church authorities learned he had been secretly baptized. Church law at the time required all Catholics to be raised as Catholics and educated in the faith.

Recently, the case has made headlines again after a U.S. historian, David Kertzer, found discrepancies between the Spanish text of Mortara’s memoirs held in the archives of his religious order, and an Italian translation published in 2005 by Italian journalist Vittorio Messori.

The Associated Press this week located the Spanish text in the Historic Archives of St. Peter in Chains, a Rome church famous for its Michelangelo statue of a horned Moses, and compared it with the Italian translation. Here are the key findings of the AP analysis:

• The 89-page notebook-sized autobiography, El Nino Mortara y Pio Nono (The Mortara Child and Pope Pius) isn’t actually Mortara’s original, hand-written text, which Kertzer says was penned in 1888. Rather, it is a typed up, spiral-bound booklet prepared nearly a century later by the Rev. Juan Oleaga, a Spanish member of Mortara’s religious order who also prepared a typed-up booklet of Mortara’s correspondence in 1994.

• In a brief introduction to the autobiography, Oleaga wrote that he faithfully typed Mortara’s text and that it was “fruit of a spirit that possesses the truth.” He said Mortara died ever grateful to Pope Pius IX, who authorized his removal and took him under his wing, and remained close to his family “even though he never got to see them converted to Catholicism.”

• Oleaga appears to have written a long footnote in the first few pages of the text in which he justifies the taking of Mortara from his parents and recounts a tearful reunion between Mortara and the Inquisition official responsible for it. That footnote — written in the same typeface as Orteaga’s introduction and set off from the Spanish text with an asterisk — is seamlessly integrated into Messori’s version as if Mortara himself had written it.

• Mortara’s anti-Semitic comments contained in the original Spanish were removed in Messori’s version, including reference to Mortara having “always professed an inexpressible horror” toward Jews. Mortara’s original writings that the faith of his family was “false, contradictory, absurd, condemned by history and burdened by the ‘ridiculous’ which the majority of men condemn,” was reduced in Messori’s text to Judaism being merely “contradictory and surpassed by history.”

• Messori’s version removes references to the “neurosis” and psychological problems Mortara suffered later in life and omits a reference to his “violent” removal from his parents and how much he missed his mother. It also said he was “miraculously” cured from the illness that prompted his baptism. The Spanish text makes no reference to a miracle.

• Kertzer points out that even Mortara’s original Spanish contains factual errors, including names and dates that were corrected in Messori’s version. Mortara’s account also includes an anecdote that Kertzer says has no basis in documentary evidence: that Pius, after learning of the baptism but before removing the child, had tried to persuade his parents to accept a compromise to send Edgardo to a Catholic boarding school in Bologna so they could visit him “whenever they wanted.” Kertzer says that based on court testimony from the time, there is no evidence of any such negotiation and that when the police arrived to take Edgardo away, it came as a complete shock to the family.
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