Secretary General Agnès Callamard’s reflections on the state of human rights in 2025/26

Throughout 2025, voracious predators stalked through our global commons, hulking hunters plundering unjust trophies. Political leaders like Trump, Putin and Netanyahu, among many others, carried out their conquests for economic and political domination through destruction, suppression and violence on a massive scale.

As Amnesty International has long warned, a global environment where primitive ferocity could flourish has been long in the making. But in 2025, accelerants were recklessly poured over dry kindling, as sharp U-turns were taken away from the international order that had been imagined out of the ashes of the Holocaust and the utter destruction of world wars, and constructed slowly and painfully, albeit insufficiently, over these past 80 years.

Yet rather than confront the predators, in 2025 most governments opted for appeasement, including most European states. Some sought even to imitate the predator. Others ducked for cover under their shadow. A mere handful chose to stand up to them.

One firebreak after another was breached: through complicity in, or silence about, the commissions of genocide and crimes against humanity; and through imposition of crippling sanctions against those working to deliver justice. That’s how 2025 will be remembered: for its bullies and predators; for the pouring of the politics of appeasement onto burning betrayals of international obligations; for self-defeatism; for states playing with a fire that threatens now to burn us all and scorch the future too, for generations to come.

Not an illusion

Some might suggest that by 2025 there was little left to undermine, the now failing global system delivering little other than greater power to the already powerful Western world. Some claim 2025 simply laid bare a pleasant illusion.

Those narratives distort the history of the post-World War II order. They erase the masterful work of generations of diplomats and civil society activists the world over, who, often against the wishes of far more powerful actors, helped imagine, shape and advocate for that rule-based order, and never gave up demanding that the order live up to its stated purpose.

The 1948 adoptions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention, and the many other normative instruments debated and adopted over the subsequent 80 years, are no illusion. They are tangible manifestations of a post-world war order founded on a multilateral system of equal states, rooted in universal human rights, and dedicated to non-recurrence of atrocities.

We all know that the system’s promise remains unfulfilled, but it is not for the promise-breaker to declare that promise a fantasy.

Moreover, that system was never just in the hands of the powerful. At its very inception, smaller nations outmanoeuvred the large. It was they who ensured that the Universal Declaration promised human rights for all people universally, without distinction, and equally between men and women. In the years thereafter, waves of anti-colonial struggles and emancipatory movements took nourishment and additional legitimacy in those very affirmations, often against the wishes of Europe. It was the newest states of Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia, who, along with civil society the world over, led the development of the Covenant on Economic and Social Rights, the Convention on the Right of the Child, and the Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, against the will of the United States of America.

Under the influence of international human rights instruments, these past 80 years have seen deep transformations of our world for the better. The direction of travel has bent towards greater justice, towards addressing power imbalances between states, towards recognition and protection of the rights of racialized and Indigenous peoples, of women, of LGBTI persons, and by enshrining in domestic laws universal commitments on substantive equality, sexual and reproductive rights, and labour rights, to name but a few.

Make no mistake: reports of the death of the international rule-based order are greatly exaggerated. But the death notices are issued not because the system is ineffective, inefficient or too slow, but because it is not serving the interests of the politically and economically powerful and their appeasers. They now wish us to believe it was all but a chimera, a pleasant fiction that has outlived its purpose.

This must be resisted by defending normative guardrails, disrupting the worst attacks against the 1948 rule-based order and transforming it for greater fulfilment and reach of its promises.

That resistance does not mean papering over the raging double standards that have dogged its implementation or discounting its ineffectiveness or paralysis. Nor does it mean ignoring the multiple violations of its universal promise, with millions denied its protections – including the Palestinian victims of Israel genocide, apartheid and occupation; Afghan women whose country has become an open-air prison; or Iranian protesters who, early in 2026 were subjected to perhaps the largest mass-killing in Iran’s recent history.

Nor does resisting Donald Trump or Vladamir Putin’s attacks on the rule-based order mean accepting China’s vision. That is no alternative, for China too has consistently rejected universal human rights, and monitoring of compliance with global conventions. The Chinese search for hegemony may take a different form and be delivered with different tools, but it has the same outcome: inequity and repression.

A new order in the making?

What alternative to the imperfect global experiment initiated in 1948 is on offer? The undermining of international law, attacks against the International Criminal Court (ICC), withdrawal from international conventions, abandonment of UN agencies. Having paralysed the UN Security Council through unconscionable abuse of their veto powers, the predators now assert that peace and security mechanisms don’t work and seek to replace them with self-serving alternatives.

The predatory world order discards racial and gender justice, mocks women’s rights, declares civil society a common enemy and rejects international solidarity. It directs an unprecedented hike in military investments, enables unlawful arms transfers and imposes sweeping cuts to international aid budget, risking millions of avoidable deaths and decimating thousands of organizations working for human rights, sexual and reproductive rights or press freedom.

This predatory alternative world order silences dissent and suppresses protests, deploys dehumanizing rhetoric, and facilitates hate crimes and the weaponization of the law. It is predicated not on respect for our common humanity, but on trade supremacy and technological hegemony.

At the beginning of 2026, the vision for that new order was expounded by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a Western alliance of Christian people led by the US, rooted unapologetically and proudly in a common heritage, romantically described throughout the speech. But the words cannot hide the facts: this is a history too of domination, colonialism, slavery and genocide.

In that “new” but all too familiar system, the predators and their appeasers rebuke, deter and persecute those seeking equality within and between states. Atonement for past injustices is mocked. War, not diplomacy, rules: Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza continues in spite of the so-called ceasefire; Russia’s crimes against humanity in Ukraine escalate; the USA engages in extraterritorial extrajudicial killings and unlawful attacks on Venezuela and Iran, and threats to take over Greenland; multiple crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar and Sudan remain unchecked; and people in the Middle East are plunged again into a chaos that threatens to engulf more and more countries.

That is a vision for naked hegemony, for a world without a moral compass.

A turnaround in 2026?

Few states have found the courage to speak up against the roaring of cannons over diplomacy. Some joined the Hague Group, a bloc of states committed to “coordinated legal and diplomatic measures” in defence of international law and solidarity with the people of Palestine. Others contributed to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Canada called on the Middle Powers to come together and invest in collective resilience. A few, such as Spain, consistently denounced the dismantling of normative guardrails.

In early 2026, some European states appeared to take fuller measure of the risks, refusing to join the US and Israeli attacks on Iran and committing to protect strategic sovereignty, but along with the European Union fell short of reasserting the primacy of international law and universal rights.

Determination to stand up for global norms

A fear of retaliation for speaking out against the powerful is palpable the world over. But there was also much evidence throughout 2025 of governments continuing to lay down the brickwork of the allegedly “illusory” international rule-based order and of widespread civil society determination to stand up for and enhance global norms.

The Council of Europe established the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. The ICC issued arrest warrants against two Taliban leaders for the crime against humanity of gender-based persecution, and unsealed warrants against Libyan nationals accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. A hybrid criminal court in the Central African Republic convicted six former members of an armed group for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The UN Human Rights Council established an independent investigative mechanism for Afghanistan. Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Philippines, was handed over to the ICC under a warrant for the crime against humanity of murder. In the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, 156 states voted for negotiations on an international instrument on autonomous weapons systems. In July, the EU extended the scope of goods covered by its pioneering Anti-Torture Regulation. Significant progress was made in 2025 towards a binding UN tax convention. At COP30, civil society and trade union pressure helped adoption of a Just Transition Mechanism for the protection of workers and communities as countries shift to clean energy and a climate-resilient future. The International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued advisory opinions affirming state human rights obligations to respond to climate damage. Colombia and the Netherlands agreed to co-host the First International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in April 2026. Countrywide strikes and actions by dockworkers mounted in France, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Spain and Sweden disrupted arms shipment routes to Israel. The governments of Belgium, Bolivia, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Slovenia, South Africa and Spain committed in 2025 to modify or halt arms trade with Israel. Women gained expanded abortion rights in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Luxemburg, and Malawi. In Nepal, a youth-led uprising against corruption toppled the government.

Resist, we did. Resist, we must. And resist, we will.

This is not just another “challenging period”. It is the challenging moment, threatening to destroy all that was built up over the last 80 years. We the people will rise to this historical moment. We will have the ambition these times demand, and the courage to also change with them. We must do so as politicians and diplomats; as activists and consumers; as workers and producers; as an electorate and as investors; as persons of faith and people with the courage of our convictions. Together, we must build strong multi-stakeholder coalitions and encourage states to do the same.

Today “still we rise” means focusing on what must be defended as a matter of priority and at all costs, not only for the sake of our human rights but those of future generations too. In our resistance, we must also clearly identify what must be disrupted as a matter of absolute priority, among the tsunami of laws, policies, and practices unleashed by predatory State and non-State actors. Resistance also means getting clear about what must be transformed. Given the unprecedented pace and amount of change underway, we will have to turn once again to the power of our imagination and the daring of our creativity. We must imagine a transformed and transformative human rights vision for the world that we are becoming, not merely defend human rights in terms of the world we once were. Together, we must then lead that transformation into existence, with all our creativity, determination and resilience.

History is not just something that is done to us. It is also ours to make. And for the sake of humanity, it’s time to make human rights history.

Agnès Callamard

Secretary General

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