The world is in a “democratic recession” with almost three-quarters of the global population now living under autocratic rulers – levels not seen since the 1980s, according to a new report.
The system underpinning human rights was “in peril”, said Philippe Bolopion, executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), with a growing authoritarian wave becoming “the challenge of a generation”, he said.
Speaking before the launch of the human rights watchdog’s annual country-by-country assessment, published on Wednesday, Bolopion said 2025 had been a “tipping point” for rights and freedoms in the US. In just 12 months, the Trump administration has carried out a broad assault on key pillars of American democracy and the global rules-based international order, which the US, despite inconsistencies, helped to establish. It was now working in the “opposite direction”, he said.
Citing Donald Trump’s calls on Republicans this week to “nationalise” the US voting system and revelations that a member of an Emirati royal family was behind a $500m investment into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, Bolopion said: “Every day you see confirmation of this trend, but when you step back you see an organised, relentless, determined assault on all of the checks and balances that are meant to limit executive power in US democracy – a system designed to limit power and protect rights.”
He called on democracies, including the UK, the European Union and Canada, to form a strategic alliance to preserve the rules-based international order, which is under threat from Trump, Russia and China.
The HRW report catalogues attacks on the rights-based system during Trump’s second-term administration. They include undermining trust in the sanctity of elections, reducing government accountability, attacking judicial independence, defying court orders, using government powers to intimidate political opponents, the media, law firms, universities, civil society and even comedians.
Recent abuses, from attacks on free speech to deporting people to countries where they may face torture, underscored this assault on the rule of law, the organisation said.
Combined with longstanding efforts by Russia and China to weaken the global rules-based order, the US administration’s actions had enormous repercussions around the world, said Bolopion, leaving the global human rights system in peril.
“Under relentless pressure from US President Donald Trump, and persistently undermined by China and Russia, the rules-based international order is being crushed, threatening to take with it the architecture human rights defenders have come to rely on to advance norms and protect freedoms,” he said.
“Trump has boasted that he doesn’t ‘need international law’ as a constraint, only his ‘own morality’,” Bolopion warned.
HRW also reports on the UK, finding that the British government “repeatedly undermined” rights in 2025.
The Labour government’s punitive approach to immigration had played a “key role” in making the anti-migrant rhetoric that had emboldened the far right increasingly part of mainstream debate, it said. The human rights organisation criticises the UK’s authoritarian crackdown on the right to protest and a failure to address adequately the worsening cost-of-living crisis.
Anti-migrant rhetoric was a “dangerous trend for human rights in the UK, but also [in] France and Germany and other European counties”, Bolopion said, adding that Trump had encouraged this by claiming Europe was threatened by “civilisational erasure”. By also leaning into racist tropes to cast entire populations in the US as unwelcome, he was “flirting with far-right ideology”, he said.
This “democratic recession” pre-dated Trump and began decades ago, the report found. Democracy is now back to 1985 levels, with 72% of the world’s population now living under autocracy. Together with the undermining of the rules-based order, this presented a “perfect storm” for human rights and freedoms around the world, HRW said.
The foreword to the report states: “Russia and China are less free today than 20 years ago. And so is the United States.”
An alliance of rights-based democracies could become a “powerful force” and a “substantial economic bloc”, offering incentives to counter policies that had undermined multilateral trade governance and human rights, Bolopion said, adding that such an alliance could form a powerful voting bloc at the UN.
The work of civil society was also crucial in this “dangerous new world”, he said. “It is a challenging time but one for action, not for despair.”
There was hope he said, citing public anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, after the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good last month by federal immigration officers, protests in Iran, which began after a sharp fall in the value of Iranian currency but grew to include calls for political change, to Gen Z protests in Morocco over underfunded healthcare and education.
