The Foreign Service Journal, June 2013

32 JUNE 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The Obama administration’s experiences with Congress on human rights during its first term echo those of its predecessors. In 1976 Congress passed an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act that mandated an annual report by the Secretary of State tracking the way countries that received U.S. aid observe internationally recognized human rights. This led the Carter admin- istration to create what became the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. DRL’s annual report has grown to a vast undertaking that catalogs each country’s record on respecting norms for civil and political rights. Other notable con- gressionally instigated actions on human rights include annual reporting on religious freedom and human trafficking, and the appointment of a special rights monitor for North Korea. How Effective a Watchdog? Many rights activists regard the annual U.S. country reports as the most thorough of their kind, even while a number of allies and partners regularly protest them. Though the impact of the reports is hard to measure, they are generally seen as helpful for maintaining a steady spotlight on abusive practices. Other reports have sharper teeth. The annual survey on human trafficking, for instance, threatens to impose sanc- tions on countries that fail to act to curb the practice and has the potential to move the needle, say scholars Judith Kelley of Duke University and Beth Simmons at Harvard University. They found in a 2012 study that “merely being included in the report motivates countries to criminalize human trafficking.” The Jackson-Vanik Amendment is credited with even more sweeping results. The legislation helped lead to the free emi- gration of hundreds of thousands of people, and human rights proponents say the measure served to underpin U.S. concerns over human rights in the Soviet Union through the end of the Cold War. Congress has continued to be an important monitor of human rights issues in the former Soviet bloc and beyond through its involvement in the Helsinki Commission, a government agency established in 1976 to press for compli- ance with rights principles in the 57-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The commission holds regular public hearings and briefings with expert witnesses to assess developments involving rights, security, and economic and democratic developments. Still, some experts accuse members of Congress of over- zealousness on rights issues, pointing to the creation of scores of mandates, some seeming to duplicate reporting already carried out in the annual global rights survey, which must be handled by an overtaxed State Department. Diplomats have also expressed deep frustration at the failure of the Senate to Anne Wenikoff