As the United States negotiated this year’s nuclear pact with Iran, the State Department quietly agreed to spare the Gulf sultanate of Oman from an embarrassing public rebuke over its human rights record, rewarding a close Arab ally that helped broker the historic deal.
In a highly unusual intervention, the department’s hierarchy overruled its own staff’s assessments of Oman’s deteriorating record on forced labor and human trafficking and inflated its ranking in a congressionally mandated report, US officials told Reuters. The move, which followed protests by Oman, suggests the Obama administration placed diplomatic priorities over human rights to pacify an important Middle East partner.
In the weeks leading up to publication of the State Department’s influential annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, top advisers to Secretary of State John Kerry disregarded findings by its Middle East diplomatic bureau and a US government office set up to independently grade global efforts to fight human trafficking, the officials said.
In April, diplomats in the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs bureau and experts in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons agreed that Oman would be downgraded from “Tier 2” to a status known as “Tier 2 Watch List,” one notch above a level that can incur US sanctions, according to an internal department memo seen by Reuters.
Oman, they agreed, had not done enough to improve the plight of migrant laborers and domestic workers who make up a large part of its expatriate community.
In June, when the final report is usually published, the advisers to Kerry took an unusual step. They put the entire 382-page document on hold, two sources with knowledge of the process told Reuters.
But the case of Oman illustrates how even a small country that is strategically significant to the United States can win concessions despite Washington’s public insistence that it bases its ranking system solely on human rights.
In its protests over the possible downgrade, Oman stressed its broader strategic importance to the United States, according to US officials.
While it is not unusual for a country’s ranking to be contested between the State Department’s human rights analysts and political bureaus such as Near Eastern Affairs, high-level intervention to change a ranking after those two parties have agreed is extremely rare.
By the time this year’s TIP report was published on July 27, five weeks later than usual, Oman’s ranking had been maintained at “Tier 2.”
“I’m not aware of a case where something like this has happened before,” said Mark Lagon, the TIP office’s ambassador-at-large from 2007 to 2009 and now president of Freedom House, an advocacy group in Washington.
The reprieve has important implications. Watch List countries are defined as those where the absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is “very significant or significantly increasing,” according to the State Department.
A Western diplomatic source said he believes Kerry is “protecting Oman when it comes to this issue,” referring to human trafficking.
Kerry’s press office declined to directly address whether he deliberately shielded Oman in the latest TIP report.
A Reuters investigation published on Aug. 3 revealed a high degree of “grade inflation” in this year’s rankings.
An unprecedented number of diplomatically sensitive countries such as Malaysia, China, Cuba, Uzbekistan and Mexico wound up with ratings higher than recommended by the State Department’s own human rights experts.
