“Women’s rights are human rights,” Hillary Clinton tweeted Thursday in response to the reported change. | Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images Clinton, lawmakers denounce State Dept. for cutting language on women's rights

Hillary Clinton, lawmakers and human rights groups are speaking out against the State Department’s decision to trim language on women’s reproductive rights and discrimination from an upcoming report that was first reported by POLITICO .

“Women’s rights are human rights,” Clinton tweeted Thursday in response to the reported change. “That was a radical idea back in 1995. It shouldn’t still be two decades later.”


The yearly report on global human rights, five former and current department officials said, will be stripped of passages that discuss issues of family planning, including information on how much access women have to contraceptives and abortion.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the department’s decision “appalling.”

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“As if this administration hasn’t already done enough to damage U.S. global leadership on human rights,” he said in a statement, “I am profoundly alarmed to read reports of Secretary Tillerson’s alleged efforts to water down or delete critical sections of the State Department’s annual ‘Country Reports on Human Rights’ related to women’s rights and on the responsibilities of governments to protect individual rights regardless of race, ethnicity or LGBT status.”

The decision, believed to have been approved by senior officials in the State Department working under Secretary Rex Tillerson, reflects a shift in stance on family planning that differs from predecessors’.

The directive for the document, which has not yet been released, also reportedly trims language detailing racial, ethnic and sexual discrimination globally.

The State Department’s spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, emphasized on Thursday that the report had been routinely “revised and reformed” over the years and that any pending changes did not reflect a diminished interest in protecting human rights abroad.

“This year we are changing some of the terms that are being used in the report, but not our commitment to women’s rights, women’s health or to human rights whatsoever,” Nauert said at a daily briefing. “Make no mistake, human rights is a top priority here.”

Rights groups condemned the reported measures, which they characterized as anti-woman and anti-LGBT.

The director of the Human Rights Campaign’s global program, Ty Cobb, called it “unconscionable that Trump-Pence political appointees are ordering State Department officials to roll back language on anti-LGBTQ discrimination and women's rights in the annual human rights report.”

He added: “This shameful move is yet another indication of Secretary Tillerson’s dangerously negligent indifference toward LGBTQ people around the globe.”

The State Department pushed back on claims that it was rolling back support for LGBT communities and women’s rights.

“We have also made a few changes to sharpen the focus of the report on abuses of internationally recognized human rights and the most egregious issues,” Nauert said on Thursday. “We are not downgrading coverage of LGBT or women’s issues, which remain important components of our policy.”

Nahal Toosi contributed to this report.

