Human Rights Watch (HRW) has launched its annual World Report 2026, warning that the worldwide system of human rights is in “peril”, with 72 p.c of the world’s inhabitants now residing underneath “autocracy”.
Within the report (PDF) revealed on Wednesday, the rights physique warned that the USA, China and Russia are “led by leaders who share open disdain for norms”, and “wield appreciable financial, army, and diplomatic energy”.
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“Underneath relentless stress from US President Donald Trump, and persistently undermined by China and Russia, the rules-based worldwide order is being crushed, threatening to take with it the structure human rights defenders have come to depend on to advance norms and shield freedoms,” Philippe Bolopion, govt director at HRW, stated in an announcement.
“To defy this pattern, governments that also worth human rights, alongside social actions, civil society, and worldwide establishments, have to kind a strategic alliance to push again.”
Under are the highlights of the report that paint a bleak image of the worldwide human rights scenario.
United States
The HRW report accuses the Trump administration of a “broad assault on key pillars of US democracy and the worldwide rules-based order”.
“Immigrants and asylum seekers have been subjected to inhumane circumstances and degrading remedy; 32 died in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in 2025”, and one other 4 in January 2026, it stated.
The “illegal” abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, together with its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council and the World Well being Group and its sanctions on Palestinian human rights organisations, the prosecutor of the Worldwide Felony Courtroom and ICC judges, in addition to a UN particular rapporteur, had been highlighted within the report.
“Trump’s second administration has been marked from the beginning by blatant disregard for human rights and egregious violations,” the report stated, including that the US authorities is searching for “to weaken worldwide establishments created to implement human rights requirements and maintain violators to account”.
Israel
“The Israeli armed forces have dedicated acts of genocide, ethnic cleaning, and crimes in opposition to humanity,” the report stated, including that “These crimes had been met with uneven world condemnation and never almost sufficient motion.”
Trump’s plans for Gaza “could be tantamount to ethnic cleaning”, HRW stated, whereas Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza and its demolitions and illegal restrictions within the occupied West Financial institution proceed.
The report comes days after the Israel-Palestine director of HRW give up after the rights physique “blocked” a report on Israeli atrocities in opposition to Palestinians. Omar Shakir, who has labored for the rights group for greater than 10 years, advised Al Jazeera he has misplaced religion within the organisation after its new chief, Bolopion, blocked a report accusing Israel of committing “crimes in opposition to humanity” in its denial of Palestinian refugees’ proper of return.
Shakir stated on Tuesday that the report “sought to attach the erasure of camps in Gaza with the emptying of camps within the West Financial institution, with the total assault led by the Israeli authorities in opposition to UNRWA, the help company for Palestinian refugees and underscoring how within the midst of this Nakba 2.0 that we’re seeing unfold past us, it’s essential that we study the teachings from Nakba 1.0”.
The Nakba, which implies disaster, refers back to the pressured displacement of 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their properties and land by Zionist militias main as much as the institution of the State of Israel in 1948.
Ukraine
In Ukraine, Russia’s “indiscriminate bombing, coercing Ukrainians in occupied areas to serve within the Russian army, systematic torture of Ukrainian prisoners of warfare, the kidnapping and deportation of Ukrainian youngsters to Russia, and using quadcopter drones to hunt and kill civilians” haven’t been met with significant stress.
Russia
Russia’s intensifying crackdown on dissent and civil society contains authorities utilizing ill-treatment of these in custody as a “device of repression” and wielding laws to focus on “international brokers” and “undesirable” organisations.
The top of the election monitoring group Golos, Grigory Melkonyants, was sentenced to 5 years in jail. Three legal professionals had been sentenced to jail phrases for offering authorized providers to the Anti-Corruption Basis’s founder, Alexey Navalny, who died in jail in 2024.
“Authorities all through the nation continued to prosecute folks for commemorating Navalny’s reminiscence, sharing details about him, utilizing his identify, or displaying his portrait,” the report stated.
The muse was additionally designated a “terrorist group” by the nation’s Supreme Courtroom. Worldwide rights teams, together with HRW, Amnesty Worldwide, Reporters With out Borders and the Worldwide Federation for Human Rights, have additionally been banned in Russia.
China
In China, authorities “systematically deny the rights to freedom of expression, affiliation, meeting, and faith, and persecute authorities critics”, the report says.
With the state controlling all vital channels of data and a number of the world’s “most stringent surveillance and censorship”, critics face imprisonment and compelled disappearance. Human rights defenders are continuously harassed and tortured, whereas those that belong to “unlawful” spiritual teams are harassed and detained by police.
As Tibetans and Uighurs are pressured to assimilate, the federal government launched draft laws, Selling Ethnic Unity and Progress, which “seeks to justify present repression of minorities and facilitate intensifying ideological controls each at dwelling and overseas”.
Filling the vacuum
The report stresses there’s an “pressing want for a brand new world alliance to help human rights”.
HRW stated it’s “essential to look past the same old suspects”, pointing to international locations reminiscent of Costa Rica, Ghana, Malaysia, Mexico, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Vanuatu, which have “performed vital roles on particular human rights initiatives in key worldwide boards”.
Chile’s Democracy Ceaselessly summit introduced collectively leaders from Brazil, Colombia, Spain and Uruguay, who pledged to have interaction in “lively democratic diplomacy”, whereas The Hague Group was shaped in solidarity with Palestinians and in defence of worldwide regulation.
Scholar protests in help of Palestine, protests in opposition to ICE abuses within the US and Gen Z protests in Nepal, Indonesia and Morocco had been cited as examples of tolerating folks energy.
