Amnesty International’s annual report, The State of the World’s Human Rights, published on April 20th, 2026, and covering 144 countries, delivers a verdict on 2025 that is more than a warning. It is a diagnosis of collapse. The organisation’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, describes a world where powerful states, corporations and anti-rights movements have moved beyond eroding the edges of the international system to mounting a direct assault on its foundations. “This is a direct assault on the foundations of human rights and the international rules-based order by the most powerful actors for the purpose of control, impunity and profit,” she said.

The report documents a catalogue of violations across every region. Israel has continued what Amnesty describes as a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza despite the October 2025 ceasefire, while accelerating illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank. The United States has committed over 150 extrajudicial executions by bombing boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific and carried out what the report characterises as an act of aggression against Venezuela in January 2026. Russia has intensified aerial attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. The UAE has fuelled conflict in Sudan by supplying Chinese weaponry to the Rapid Support Forces, which seized control of El Fasher following an 18-month siege. In the DRC, the M23 armed group, backed by Rwanda, captured Goma and Bukavu.

The report also documents a proliferation of attacks on civil society. In the United Kingdom, more than 2,700 people were arrested for opposing a ban on Palestine Action, a direct-action network, under counterterrorism laws. The UK High Court ruled the ban unlawful in February 2026; the government is appealing. Turkish authorities detained hundreds of protesters following the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. In the United States, AI-powered surveillance tools were used to target foreign students expressing solidarity with Palestinians. A US court ordered Greenpeace to pay a fossil fuel company $345 million, reduced from an initial award of $660 million, in a case Amnesty characterises as a strategic lawsuit against public participation.

The USA, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK announced or enacted sweeping cuts to international aid budgets, even as many simultaneously committed to large increases in military spending. The UN Environment Programme has warned that the world is on track to reach 3°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Yet resistance persists. Gen Z protests swept more than a dozen countries in 2025, including Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Morocco, Nepal, and Peru. Around 300,000 people defied Hungary’s ban on Budapest Pride. Dockworkers in France, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Spain, and Sweden disrupted arms shipment routes to Israel. The Philippines handed former president Rodrigo Duterte to the International Criminal Court. The Council of Europe and Ukraine agreed to establish a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. At COP30, a Just Transition Mechanism was adopted. In 156 UN General Assembly votes, states backed negotiations on an international instrument governing autonomous weapons systems. Women gained expanded abortion rights in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Luxembourg, and Malawi.

“To appease aggressors is to pour fuel on a fire that will burn us all,” Ms. Callamard said. She called on states to reject the politics of appeasement and forge coalitions to reimagine a global order built around human rights, the rule of law and universal values.

Source: Amnesty International Annual Report 2025/26, April 20th, 2026