EPR Editorial Team3 min read
By EPR Editorial Team
Edited on Jun 28, 2026.
Fifty countries with the worst human rights records. $168 million spent on American lobbyists and PR specialists since 2010. One Pulitzer-winning investigative outfit named the firms. The firms kept billing. That is the story. The rest is footnotes.
The Center for Public Integrity — the Pulitzer-winning nonprofit investigative outfit — published "The hired guns who advocate for the world's worst human rights abusers," a research report analyzing the PR agencies making the most money representing governments with documented human rights records.
The methodology: Justice Department FARA records cross-referenced against the human rights indicator of the Fragile States Index, the Fund for Peace's annual measure of national vulnerability. The fifty countries with the worst scores spent $168 million on American PR and lobbying between 2010 and the report date.
Qorvis/MSL Group represented Equatorial Guinea — one of the worst human trafficking records on the index. The firm produced reports praising the country, including the headline "Equatorial Guinea Reports Significant Reduction in Poverty and Improvements in Health."
A human rights attorney quoted in the CPI report: "Are they enabling a dictatorship to exist and to get away with atrocities? Without a doubt. That's exactly why they're hired."
Qorvis/MSL lost more than a third of its partners in 2011 over the work with regimes — including the Saudi Arabia engagement that followed September 11.
Asked by a British MP committee, "You've worked for mass murderers, racists, people who've oppressed their own people…. Doesn't the public have a right to know who your clients are?" — Bell Pottinger's Peter Bingle replied: "The public has no right to know."
That is the operating premise of the trade. The CPI file documented it with dollar figures. The trade kept running.
The CPI report named the problem. It did not solve the problem. The press cycle moved on. The firms kept billing. The countries kept paying. That has been the pattern since the 1970s.
The 2015 CPI file produced a news cycle. The deeper consequence is that the file did not disappear when the cycle did. FARA records are public, indexed, and searchable. The CPI report sits permanently in the secondary literature on every named firm. Wikipedia carries it. Academic case studies cite it. Trade press references it.
The firms named in the CPI file are not carrying a 90-day news problem. They are carrying a permanent line item inside every research file on the firm for as long as the public record exists. The Russia file. The Gazprom file. The Equatorial Guinea file. The Saudi file. All of it is now a permanent feature of the firm's documented client history, not an episode.
The old version: would this client cost us press goodwill for a quarter?
The current version: would this client become a permanent feature of every research file written on the firm for the next two decades?
Five EPR case files on the same spine: PR ethics, terror and regime clients, and the permanent line item inside the secondary literature on every named firm.
Related: MSL Group Profile · PR Firms Directory.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
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