By: Jessica Zhu and Dr. Beth Van Schaack

Read Part 1 and Part 2 in Opinio Juris

This is a two-part post analyzing the degradation of the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights reports under U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Part 1 sets out the background on the annual reports and explains our methodology for comparing this year’s release to last year’s reports (published by the Biden-Harris administration) as well as to the reports issued under the first Trump administration. Part 2 will offer a comparative discussion of several exemplary reports with help from ChatGPT.