Afrasianet - U.S. President Donald Trump is turning the United States into an authoritarian state at a time when democracy and human rights around the world are being violated, Human Rights Watch has warned.
The New York-based rights group noted in its annual report that Trump's return to the White House has exacerbated the global "downward trend" of human rights, which was already in decline due to the behavior of Russia and China.
"One year into Trump's inauguration, history is accelerating in the wrong direction, as all the gains and progress made as a result of a bitter struggle over the past decades are under threat," the organization's executive director, Philippe Bolopion, told AFP.
"The rules-based international order is in the process of collapsing," she warned.
In relation to the United States, Human Rights Watch said Trump had shown "gross disregard for human rights and committed serious violations."
The report pointed to the deployment of masked and armed agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department, for example, who carried out "hundreds of violent raids (...) unjustified", particularly in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The report listed some manifestations of "the slippage (...) toward authoritarianism in the United States," including "the choice of the U.S. administration as a scapegoat on racial or ethnic grounds, its frequent retaliatory practices against its political opponents, and its attempts to expand the coercive powers of the executive branch and disrupt democratic checks and balances."
The organization also reiterated that the United States is responsible for enforced disappearances that criminalize international law, by sending 252 Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
Democracy has declined to the level it was in 1985, when the Soviet Union was still in existence.
With regard to Israel, the organization reiterated its condemnation of "crimes against humanity, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing" against Palestinians in Gaza.
It noted that "the Israeli authorities have intensified their atrocities" in 2025, foremost of which is "the killing, maiming, starving, forcible displacement of Palestinians, and the destruction of their homes, schools and infrastructure on a scale unprecedented in the recent history of Israel and Palestine."
