U.S. President Donald Trump’s domestic policies have been painful for the United States’ workers. His foreign policy has followed suit. Nationally and internationally, this administration has undermined labor rights, gutted institutions that enforce labor standards, and targeted labor unions—to the detriment of working people everywhere.
By: Beth Van Schaack, Desirée Cormier Smith, Catherine Powell
The Trump administration has chosen to retreat from UN human rights standards and processes. These decisions make Americans less safe.
Radio Interview by David Hunt featuring Jessica Stern
For more than two decades, activist, educator, diplomat Jessica Stern has worn a variety of hats in her efforts to advance LGBTQ human rights around the world, always at the forefront — unafraid, unapologetic, speaking truth to power. Currently serving as Senior Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy Fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, Stern talks about her pioneering work at the United Nations, her tenure as the top queer diplomat in the U.S. State Department and her advice for standing up for human rights in a hostile world (interviewed by David Hunt).
By: Jessica Stern, Suzanne B. Goldberg, Reggie Greer
In Dhaka, Bangladesh, a young gay man who had traveled five hours to meet us at the U.S. ambassador’s residence spoke softly about the violence he endured. For years, activists like him would meet with U.S. officials to tell their stories, trusting our government to publish their truth for the world to hear. Last week, the Trump administration betrayed that trust and cast aside decades of bipartisan work. Instead of fair and accurate reporting, it systematically deleted almost all references to abuse and persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) people in the 2024 U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, known as the Human Rights Reports (HRRs).
Following our recent press conference responding to the release of the U.S. State Department’s 2024 Human Rights Reports, the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice has been featured in multiple media outlets. In the link below, you’ll find links to coverage from CBS News, ABC News, New Jersey Today, More to Her Story, the Washington Blade, LGBTQ Nation, and the Huffington Post. Each piece highlights our concerns over the erasure of key sections and the troubling changes in this year’s reports compared to last year and years prior.
By: Jessica Stern & Suzanne B. Goldberg
On July 11, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio carried out his State Department overhaul plan by laying off more than 1,300 career public servants. Though the details remain unclear, the cuts appear to have targeted nearly every employee working on human rights, democracy, or global systems of justice—including almost all of the few people at the department who possessed the expertise to respond to threats against LGBTQ individuals worldwide.
By: John Yang & Dan Sagalyn for PBS News Hour
Featuring: Cindy Dyer
For 25 years, the State Department has had an office tracking the scope of human trafficking and working to combat it. In 2023, more than 133,000 victims were identified globally, leading to more than 18,000 prosecutions. Last week, the Trump administration drastically cut that office’s staff. John Yang discussed more with Cindy Dyer, the former ambassador to monitor and combat trafficking.
By: Jessica Stern & Julie Dorf
June was a hard month for democracy in the United States. Now that Pride is behind us, it’s time to take stock—not only of what we’ve lost, but also of the lessons we urgently need from LGBTQI+ victories and resistance to growing authoritarianism around the world. This week, Budapest Pride in Hungary offered exactly such a lesson.
Jessica Stern, 48, smiles, breathes, reflects, and fires off steely phrases studded with references to equality and human rights. Aware that no victory is permanent, she loads her responses with barbs aimed at the global reactionary right, but without ever losing her infectious laughter. A former U.S. Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTQI Persons under the Joe Biden administration, she attended the UN development aid summit in Seville this week to remind countries of the discrimination and violence suffered by the LGBTQ+ community on a daily basis.
By: Desirée Cormier Smith, Kelly M. Fay Rodríguez and Beth Van Schaack
What a difference eight years makes. During President Trump’s first term, then-Sen. Marco Rubio pushed the president to expand his human rights diplomatic agenda. Rubio recognized that promoting human rights abroad is in the national interest. He urged the president to appoint an assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — commonly known as DRL — after the position was left vacant for nearly two years. He co-sponsored the Women, Peace and Security Act (ensuring that the U.S. includes women in international conflict negotiations), spoke out against the torture of gay men in Chechnya and co-sponsored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
By: Abby Finkenauer and Geeta Rao Gupta
Recently, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth bragged about ending the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) program at the Department of Defense, calling it “woke” and “divisive,” and claiming that the “troops hate it.” His words are not just reckless. They are dangerous, dishonest, and uninformed.
Let’s set the record straight. WPS is not just a diversity program. WPS promotes women’s leadership in our armed and security forces — not for window dressing, but for reasons of operational efficacy and readiness. It calls for the meaningful participation of women in peace negotiations, counterterrorism operations, and post-conflict stabilization based upon empirical proof that these efforts are more effective when women are involved. It is also about prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable in conflict: women and children.
By: Jessica Stern
Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio released his proposal to reorganize the Department of State—and it’s a doozy. When I joined government as the U.S. special envoy for the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons, after a career working for human rights organizations, I found many of the clichés about government inefficiency to be true. However, Rubio’s plan—which includes reducing U.S.-based staff by 15 percent, cutting 132 offices, and transitioning an additional 137 offices into other parts of the department—is the equivalent of wielding a chainsaw when the patient deserves a scalpel.
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