Petrelis rips cut-and-paste job on State Dept. country reports

The State Department yesterday released its 2009 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. Michael Petrelis, who along with Barrett Brick and Margaret Cantrell had persuaded State in 1991 to include anti-gay incidents in its annual reports, quickly checked the report for Jamaica. He comments:

Let's talk cut-and-paste human rights accountability from the State Department under President Obama, and the annual country reports. While this year's survey of gay and HIV/AIDS related citations and abuses is probably the largest ever, it's maddening to see that the report for Jamaica and its serious violations against gay people, is not nearly as reflective of what happened in 2009 as it ought to be.

As this blog has well documented, as have so many other gay blogs and news outlets, 2009 was another year of hostilities and violence for gay Jamaicans, and the only significant difference in the latest Jamaica report over last year's is that it mentions the murder of a white non-Jamaican, the British honorary consul John Terry.

I certainly don't intend to belittle that citation, but there was plenty of new violence and troubles for native, black Jamaicans, and the annual human rights report from the U.S. State Department has done a piss-poor job of accurately informing Congress and the American public about the continuing anti-gay violations.

Questions must be raised as to why Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton think it is acceptable to cut-and-paste Jamaica's annual gay human rights record, with marginally changes. We've got to advocate for reality of the previous year to be truly reflected in the annual surveys.

I comb through the reports myself every year, and have noticed some of the same thing being done before. The more detailed and up-to-date the annual country reports are, the more valuable they will be. It is time to push for an upgrade.