US State Department’s “Eritrea 2023 Human Rights Report” once again peddles, with higher pitch this time round, a litany of its usual, fallacious and long-discredited accusations against the country.

The overarching issue is of course whether the US has, in the first place, the credentials for an exclusive and innate legal and moral right to proselytize to, and indict, the whole world on matters of “human rights and governance.”

This is indeed the cogent reason why the Annual Report is mostly shrugged off as an anachronistic and banal exercise that does not elicit serious response by most countries most of the times. That is in fact what we have done in the past. Still reminders might be useful from time to time.

In this perspective, the Embassy of the State of Eritrea to the US categorically rejects the report’s content, methodology, narrative, and its inherent and obvious ulterior motives. Indeed, there is nothing new in the nature of the report that shows any departure from the predictable vitriol against Eritrea.

But in dwelling on the recent War of Insurrection that raged in Ethiopia, the Report once again illustrates that it is not the welfare of the Eritrean people or the issues of regional peace and stability on the basis of legality that matter most to the United States.

As it was the case in past decades when US Administrations compromised Eritrea’s inalienable national rights on the altar of their overriding geo-strategic interests, the current preoccupation and primary priority of the Biden Administration remains the singular and dogged pursuit of these objectives at the expense of enduring peace, stability and meaningful cooperation in our region.

In this perspective and the disingenuous packaging aside, the Report only accentuates the prevailing, misguided, and unwarranted US policy against Eritrea.