Human Rights Watch’s annual report says liberal democracies were generally ‘not reliable’ on human rights.
United States President Joe Biden demonstrated “a double standard” on human rights, providing “arms without restriction” to Israel despite its war crimes in Gaza while condemning Russia for “similar violations” in Ukraine, according to a new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.
The rights group’s 2025 world report, published on Thursday, noted how the US withheld funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, amid Gaza’s starvation crisis due to the Israeli siege.
At the same time, the Biden administration provided Israel with an unprecedented $17.9bn in security aid and approved more than 100 arms sales.
The report highlighted the “often-disregarded reality” that liberal democracies such as the US were “not always reliable champions of human rights” at home or abroad.
It added that many of the 70 national elections held last year were deemed to have been driven by “racism, hate, and discrimination”, with polls in the US and in the European Union no exception.
The report raised concerns that US President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on January 20, would “inflict even greater human rights damage” in his second term, “emboldening illiberal leaders worldwide to follow suit”.
It also noted the advance of the far right in European Parliament elections last year, “exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment and nationalist rhetoric to advance policies that threaten minority communities and undermine democratic norms”.
Far from being beacons of human rights, “outspoken and action-oriented” liberal democracies had defended standards “weakly or inconsistently”, helping to feed a global perception that “human rights lack legitimacy”.
‘Meaningful resistance’
Amid the grim updates on Israel’s “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in Gaza, the “mass killings” in Sudan’s civil war and Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, the report pointed to positive developments in various parts of the world.
The overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham had offered insights into “the limits of autocratic power”, though the report also noted that armed groups that joined the offensive were themselves guilty of abuses and war crimes.
The report highlighted “meaningful democratic resilience” in Bangladesh, where anticorruption student protesters brought down the “repressive” government of Sheikh Hasina, forcing the formation of an interim government under Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus.
The report also highlighted that:
- In Kenya, protesters demanded an end to bad governance, corruption and mismanagement of public funds in President William Ruto’s administration.
- In Venezuela’s election, protesters demanded a fair counting of their votes against a backdrop of “brutal repression” by the government of Nicolas Maduro.
- In South Korea, President Yoon Suk-yeol’s attempt to impose martial law failed spectacularly, with thousands of people marching in protest and lawmakers eventually moving to impeach and suspend him.
- In Georgia, protests erupted over the governing party’s decision to abort the EU accession process, which many interpreted as a sign of the government’s “pivot toward authoritarianism”.
“These resistance movements highlight a crucial reality: the fight for rights is often driven by ordinary people, fed up with injustice and corruption,” said HRW.
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