By Melanie Nathan, August 24, 2025
The U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Reports began in 1977, mandated by legislation passed the year before. For nearly half a century, they have provided an unbroken, year-by-year account of human rights conditions across the globe. Published annually, usually in the spring, they have become an indispensable reference for policymakers, international organizations, human rights advocates, and asylum adjudicators. These reports have stood as a mirror to the world’s conscience.
Until now.
As a country conditions expert witness for LGBTQI+ asylum seekers from Africa, I had braced myself for what a Trump presidency might mean. It was sadly predictable that Donald Trump, as President, and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, would attempt to erase LGBTQI+ communities from the record. That grim expectation, while disturbing, was no surprise.
But when the long-delayed 2024 Human Rights Reports finally appeared—over five months late—I was stunned. Gobsmacked. They had not only “disappeared” the gays, but women too. Entire sections devoted to women’s rights were eradicated: reproductive health, gender-based violence, and critical areas like female genital mutilation (FGM) vanished overnight.
This was no clerical oversight. It was a deliberate act.
I know this because I was, at that very moment, researching FGM in Guinea for an asylum case. The cruel irony was staggering: at the precise time I was documenting the horror of this practice, the U.S. government was pretending it no longer existed.
Normally, the reports evolve incrementally from year to year. In countries like Guinea, where progress is painfully slow or non-existent, the changes are usually slight. And 2024 should have looked much like 2023: the same bleak statistics, the same urgent warnings. Instead, we were handed a whitewashed fiction—a purposeful omission that silences women’s suffering, undermines advocacy, and erases reality.
To understand the gravity: Guinea has one of the highest prevalence rates of FGM in the world. Between 94 and 96 percent of women aged 15–49 have been cut. Nearly half of girls aged 0–14 already endure the practice. Amnesty International identifies Guinea as the country with the second highest rate of FGM in Africa. This is no abstract statistic: girls die every year at excision camps. A ten-year-old lost her life in 2016. Just this year, in 2025, a five-year-old girl in Conakry bled to death after being cut.
FGM in Guinea is enforced across ethnicities and religions. It is viewed as essential for marriageability, honor, and chastity. Though Guinea’s Penal Code prohibits the practice, prosecutions are virtually nonexistent. The law exists in name only; the knife reigns in reality.
And yet—Trump’s State Department dared to delete this truth.
The omission does not just betray women in Guinea. It betrays women everywhere. It signals to authoritarian regimes that the United States no longer considers women’s rights as human rights. It is an admission, writ large, that under Trump, America holds little regard for women, their bodies, or their dignity—at home or abroad.
To erase women from the record is to erase their humanity. To silence FGM is to condone it. And to strip women of recognition in human rights reporting is to declare, in effect, that they do not matter.
That is the audacity. That is the horror.
Call to Action
Please, pick up the phone today and call your Congressional Representative and Senator. Tell them you have noticed the shocking omission: WOMEN are missing from the U.S. State Department’s 2024 Annual Global Human Rights Report. Regardless of whether they are Republican or Democrat, make sure they understand how this erasure makes you feel—how deeply it undermines America’s credibility, how it reveals this administration’s disregard for women worldwide, and how it mirrors the ongoing assault on women’s rights right here at home.
We cannot view this in isolation. It is all connected. From the Epstein files, with their damning shadows of trafficking and pedophilia, to the President’s own civil rape liability, to his alliances with Trump, to the relentless assault on reproductive freedom—the pattern is unmistakable. Women are being silenced, stripped of rights, erased from history, globally and domestically.
Transparency was promised. Instead, we are witnessing concealment. Justice was owed. Instead, women are being abandoned.
Do not stay silent. Call, write, speak up. Demand that your elected officials restore the truth, reinstate women in the reporting, and take a stand against this grotesque betrayal of human rights.
Because when women vanish from the record, democracy itself is at risk.
VISUAL EXAMPLE:
HERE IS THE 2023 GUINEA REPORT ON WOMEN:
The screenshots below reflect the 2023 Annual report for Guinea on the topic, from the Biden State Department’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Note below screenshots serve only as a visual to read any reports: Access all reports here.
HERE IS THE 2024 GUINEA REPORT ON WOMEN: The screenshots below reflect the 2024 Annual report for Guinea on the topic of women, from the Trump State Department’s Secretary of State Marci Rubio:
By Melanie Nathan
Aug 24, 2025
Commissionermnathan@gmail.com
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