Human Rights Watch. File Picture
| Picture Credit score: AFP
Human Rights Watch warned on Wednesday (February 4, 2026) that U.S. President Donald Trump was turning the USA into an authoritarian state as democracy declines globally to its lowest ebb in 4 a long time.
Mr. Trump’s return to the White Home has intensified a “downward spiral” on human rights that was already below strain from Russia and China, the New York-based advocacy and analysis group mentioned in its annual report.
“The principles-based worldwide order is being crushed,” HRW mentioned. In the USA, the group mentioned, Mr. Trump has proven “blatant disregard for human rights and egregious violations.”
In descriptions that will have been unthinkable within the US part of its earlier annual studies, the group pointed to the deployment of masked, armed brokers — the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) company — which has carried out “tons of of unnecessarily violent and abusive raids.”
“The administration’s racial and ethnic scapegoating, home deployment of Nationwide Guard forces in pretextual energy grabs, repeated acts of retaliation in opposition to perceived political enemies and former officers now vital of him, in addition to makes an attempt to increase the coercive powers of the chief and neuter democratic checks and balances, underpin a determined shift towards authoritarianism within the U.S.,” the report mentioned.
Human Rights Watch repeated its discovering that the USA engaged in enforced disappearances — a criminal offense below worldwide legislation — by sending 252 Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security jail in El Salvador.
In a current report, HRW documented allegations by the lads, who finally had been allowed into Venezuela, of being tortured together with beatings and sexual violence.
‘Much less free’ now
Human Rights Watch pointed to metrics by which democracy has declined to the extent of 1985 — when the Soviet Union nonetheless existed.
“Russia and China are much less free right now than 20 years in the past. And so is the USA,” it mentioned.
Philippe Bolopion, the group’s government director, known as on international locations to kind alliances primarily based on respect for human rights and to face collectively — together with in opposition to the tariff-wielding Mr. Trump.
“Some international locations could also be tempted to forge advert hoc alliances on particular points — someday with China, one other with Turkey, one other with South Africa,” Mr. Bolopion informed AFP.
“From our perspective, for such an alliance to be robust and lasting, it should be constructed on rules and values — democracy, worldwide legislation, human rights,” he mentioned.
“It could possibly carry weight and supply a level of safety to its members,” he mentioned.
The 529-page report stands in distinction to the most recent human rights report issued by the U.S. State Division, which toned down sections on international locations pleasant to Trump.
The State Division report mentioned El Salvador in 2024 noticed “no credible studies of great human rights abuses” and that President Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on gangs has introduced crime to a “historic low.”
The Human Rights Watch report additionally mentioned that gang violence had “markedly declined” however that in 2025 authorities carried out “widespread abuses, together with mass arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, torture and ill-treatment of detainees and due course of violations.”
HRW once more renewed its cost that Israel has carried out “crimes in opposition to humanity and acts of genocide and ethnic cleaning” in opposition to Palestinians in Gaza.
It mentioned that Israeli authorities in 2025 “escalated their atrocities” which included “killing, maiming, ravenous and forcibly displacing Palestinians and destroying their houses, faculties and infrastructure at a scale unprecedented within the current historical past of Israel and Palestine.”
Israel has angrily rejected the Human Rights Watch genocide allegation first issued in December 2024, with the USA backing Israel’s stance.
Printed – February 04, 2026 09:10 pm IST