Each year, the United States State Department prepares Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. These reports cover a number of categories, including freedom of speech and of the press. We have taken, from the recently-issued 1996 reports those sections that specifically deal with press and media rights in the republics of the former Soviet Union, central and Eastern Europe. These are spotty, hardly comprehensive reports and vary in quality from country to country. We present them both because they contain valuable information and because they represent the State Department’s official assessment.
This year, we have asked two associates, Catherine J. Fitzpatrick, the Committee to Protect Journalists' program coordinator for Eurasia, and Eric Johnson of Internews Moscow to review the reports and provide their professional assessments of the State Department's coverage. Their commentaries will follow the reports.
In an appendix to the reports, the State Department includes the following disclaimer:
By law, we must submit the reports to Congress by January 31. To comply, we provide guidance to United States diplomatic missions in July for submission of draft reports in September and October, which we update by year's end as necessary. Other offices in the Department of State provide contributions and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor prepares a final draft. Because of the preparation time required, it is possible that yearend developments may not be fully reflected. We make every effort to include reference to major events or significant changes in trends.
We have attempted to make these country reports as comprehensive as space will allow, while taking care to make them objective and as uniform as possible in both scope and quality of coverage. We have given particular attention to attaining a high standard of consistency despite the multiplicity of sources and the obvious problems related to varying degrees of access to information, structural differences in political and social systems, and trends in world opinion regarding human rights practices in specific countries.
It is often difficult to evaluate the credibility of reports of human rights abuses. With the exception of some terrorist organizations, most opposition groups and certainly most governments deny that they commit human rights abuses and often go to great lengths to conceal any evidence of such acts. There are often few eyewitnesses to specific abuses, and they frequently are intimidated or otherwise prevented from reporting what they know. On the other hand, individuals and groups opposed to a particular government sometimes have powerful incentives to exaggerate or fabricate abuses, and some governments similarly distort or exaggerate abuses attributed to opposition groups. We have made every effort to identify those groups (e.g., government forces, terrorists, etc.) that are believed, based on all the evidence available, to have committed human rights abuses. Where credible evidence is lacking, we have tried to indicate why. Many governments that profess to oppose human rights abuses in fact secretly order or tacitly condone them or simply lack the will or the ability to control those responsible for them. Consequently, in judging a government's policy, it is important to look beyond statements of policy or intent in order to examine what in fact a government has done to prevent human rights abuses, including the extent to which it investigates, tries, and appropriately punishes those who commit such abuses. We continue to make every effort to do that in these reports.
1996 U. S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices