Ecuador Underwhelmed

Ecuador Underwhelmed: Quito's Response to the State Department's Human Rights Report

The State Department’s Human Rights Assessment—Only a U.S. Perspective

In what could be seen as an effort to respond to the March 11, 2009 edition of the U.S. Department of State’s Country Reports on Human Rights, Ecuador has promised to publish its own human rights counter-report. This initiative is meant to assess Washington’s own respect for human rights from an outside perspective and is meant to be a necessary response to the State Department’s often imprudent document. Also, the very next day, March 12, China published “Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009.” At the least, this flap indicates that the report released by the U.S. has been suffering from a generalized lack of legitimacy, not only in the Latin-American region but also throughout the world. Egypt, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador and China are only a few of the countries that have taken some form of exception to the U.S. global evaluation.* The underlying thrust of this general rejection by a number of countries is that Washington should not have unilaterally assumed a condemnatory role regarding the subject because the U.S. tends to be selectively indignant when it comes to its own policies toward the allegedly offending nation.

The Department of State’s Duty

On March 11, 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted the traditional briefing in Washington D.C. in order to formally present the 34th edition of the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices that reviews human rights conditions from 2009 in more than 190 countries. Clinton affirmed that her Department’s reports provide “the most comprehensive record available of the condition of human rights around the world.” Likewise, on March 2, 2010, Michael H. Posner, Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the Department of State, declared that reports prepared by non-governmental organizations “[…] are invaluable, but they don’t have the same scope or breadth as what the State Department does. We report on 194 countries in the world.” However, the notable absence of an examination of its own human rights’ practices, to a large extent, brought on the rejection of its integrity by a number of the countries that the U.S. had condemned. Secretary Clinton asserted that “[h]uman rights are universal, but their experience is local. This is why we are committed to holding everyone to the same standard, including ourselves.”

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This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate María Gabriela Egas

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