Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

6. Department of State · Notable

Impose a text-based reading of human rights treaties as a personnel litmus test

Not started

192 6. Department of State

“It must promote a strict text-based interpretation of treaty obligations that does not consider human rights treaties as “living instruments” both within the State Department and within international organizations that receive U.S. funding, including by making respect for sovereignty and authentic human rights a litmus test of personnel decisions and elections processes within international organizations.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No instrument was found imposing a text-based reading of human rights treaty obligations, and none making respect for sovereignty a litmus test of personnel decisions or elections within international organizations. Federal Register full-text searches since 2025-01-20 return 0 documents for the quoted phrases "human rights treaties", "living instrument" and "Commission on Unalienable Rights". Adjacent action exists but does not reach this ask: the 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, released 2025-08-12, are pared back to the categories the Foreign Assistance Act and the Trade Act require; EO 14199 withdrew the United States from the UN Human Rights Council and terminated the U.S. Representative's office; and the Geneva Consensus Declaration was rejoined. None of those is a stated interpretive rule, and none is a personnel test. Re-searched 2026-09-05 by the sitemap and reports-to-Congress route described below: neither the FY 2025 nor the FY 2026 index of State's statutory reports to Congress carries an interpretive-rule or personnel-litmus-test report, and the Department's Human Rights policy page states no interpretive basis. Recorded under the cluster negative searches for ticket 09 batch 09b in `docs/research/ch-06.md`.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Every source this Status rests on is allowlisted and was read in full; none of it was off the allowlist or unreadable.

  • How far the state.gov negative reaches, re-measured 2026-09-05. State’s own site search cannot show that something is absent: every query returns an ordinary page that is not an answer, and unrelated queries return the same results. We used three substitutes instead. (1) The sitemap: state.gov’s sitemap index, a real index of 85 sub-sitemaps, harvested in full to 68,057 URLs, press releases running 2025-04-24 to 2026-09-05. (2) The reports-to-Congress indexes, which cover what the sitemap cannot: State posts its statutory reports as PDFs in the site’s uploads folder, which WordPress does not put in a sitemap, so a sitemap negative is a negative about pages and says nothing about documents. The FY 2026 index (122 reports under section 7016(b) of Div. F of P.L. 119-75) and the FY 2025 index were read in full, title by title. (3) A web search limited to state.gov, which is what surfaces the uploaded PDFs the sitemap misses. This route is what turned #159’s unreadable lead into Evidence, so its failure to find anything here is a measurement rather than an impression.
Action
restrict
Object
Interpretation of human rights treaty obligations
ID
517