Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026 places the United States at the centre of a global democratic crisis, documenting how the Trump administration’s second term has dismantled the very international order Washington once helped to build. With seventy-two per cent of the world’s population now living under autocracy and Western democracies retreating into silence, the report’s executive director asks whether human rights can survive what he calls a “Trumpian world.”
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You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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There is a particular silence that descends upon institutions when they sense the ground shifting beneath them. It is not the silence of peace but of calculation — the held breath of governments weighing their alliances against their principles, and finding the principles lighter than expected. On February 4, 2026, Human Rights Watch published its 36th annual World Report, a 529-page document that reads less like an inventory of abuses than like the clinical notes of a physician watching a patient refuse treatment.
Philippe Bolopion, who assumed the role of Executive Director only two months earlier, did not mince his language. “The global human rights system is in peril,” he wrote in his introductory essay, a sentence whose flatness carried the weight of understatement. Under relentless pressure from Donald Trump’s second administration, and persistently undermined by China and Russia, the rules-based international order — that intricate scaffolding erected, brick by brick, by states from every region since the middle of the last century — was, in Bolopion’s formulation, being crushed. What made his assessment arresting was not its severity but its precision. He was not describing a crisis of the future. He was describing the architecture of the present.
The report arrived at a moment when the word “recession” had migrated from economics into the vocabulary of democratic theory. Scholars had been using the term for years, but now it carried a statistical chill: democracy, by certain metrics, had retreated to 1985 levels, with seventy-two per cent of the world’s population living under some form of autocratic governance. Russia and China, Bolopion noted, were less free than they had been two decades ago. And so, he added — with a brevity that landed like a closing door — was the United States.
It is the American chapter that gives the report its particular gravity. In 12 months, the Trump administration had carried out what Human Rights Watch described as a broad assault on key pillars of domestic democracy and the global order which the United States, despite its contradictions, had been instrumental in building. The litany was extensive and methodical: the erosion of electoral trust, the gutting of food assistance and healthcare subsidies, attacks on judicial independence, the defiance of court orders, the rollback of women’s rights and abortion access, the termination of accessibility programmes for people with disabilities, the punishment of free speech, and the use of governmental power to intimidate political opponents, media organisations, law firms, universities, and — in a detail that might have amused a satirist — comedians.
For LGBTQ+ communities, and for transgender people in particular, the landscape had become something closer to hostile territory. Twenty-seven states had enacted bans on gender-affirming medical care for minors, with several imposing criminal penalties on healthcare providers — in Idaho, a physician could face up to ten years’ imprisonment. The Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, handed down in June 2025, had upheld Tennessee’s ban, finding that it did not constitute sex-based discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The decision effectively removed the constitutional shield that had kept many of those state-level prohibitions in legal limbo. Meanwhile, the administration had withdrawn the United States from the United Nations LGBTI Core Group and the UN Human Rights Council, dismantling the diplomatic infrastructure through which Washington had, however imperfectly, advanced queer rights on the international stage.
The report’s second term for Trump’s presidency was unadorned: “blatant disregard for human rights and egregious violations.” It documented the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes across military and civilian institutions, the embrace of rhetoric that Human Rights Watch said aligned with white nationalist ideology, and immigration enforcement operations in which masked agents targeted communities of colour — 32 people died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody during 2025 alone.
What distinguished this year’s report from its predecessors, however, was not the American chapter but the silence that surrounded it. Bolopion observed that the European Union, Canada and Australia appeared to hold back out of fear of antagonising Washington and Beijing. In Western Europe — in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France — electorates were increasingly willing to accept restrictions on the rights of what Bolopion called “others”: migrants, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ+ people. This was not, he suggested, mere policy recalibration. It was a failure of political memory. “As history shows,” he wrote, “would-be autocrats never stop at ‘others.’”
There is a temptation, when reading documents of this kind, to treat them as dispatches from a distant front — to absorb the data, note the gravity, and return to the business of the day. But the particular genius of this report lay in its refusal to let its readers do so. By placing the United States at the centre of the crisis rather than at the periphery, by naming American policy as a driver of global democratic erosion rather than merely a symptom, it dismantled the comfortable fiction that the authoritarian tide was something happening elsewhere, to other people, in countries whose names one struggles to pronounce.
Bolopion called 2025 a tipping point. The phrase is borrowed from epidemiology — the moment at which a contagion becomes self-sustaining. Whether the metaphor holds will depend, in the end, on whether the silence of the democracies proves to be caution or capitulation. History, as the report’s authors well know, rarely waits for the comfortable to decide.
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