The non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch warned on Wednesday that President Donald Trump is turning the United States into an authoritarian state, assessing that democracy and human rights are under attack from all sides and that democracy worldwide has been undermined.
HRW assessed that Trump has shown “open disregard for human rights and committed unmistakable violations.”
In describing events in the United States that would have been unimaginable in previous annual reports, the group highlighted the deployment of masked and armed ICE agents, who carried out “hundreds of unnecessarily violent and abusive raids,” particularly in Minneapolis, Minnesota, reports 24sata.
“The government seeks a scapegoat on racial or ethnic grounds. (…) It regularly retaliates against alleged political enemies, attempts to expand executive power in order to discipline and neutralize democratic checks and balances. All of this underscores a deliberate slide into authoritarianism in the United States,” the report emphasizes.
Human Rights Watch also reiterates its conclusions that the United States is responsible for enforced disappearances, which constitute a crime under international law, by sending 252 Venezuelan migrants to a high-security prison in El Salvador.
According to the organization, democracy has regressed to the level of 1985.
“Russia and China are less free today than they were 20 years ago. The same applies to the United States,” the report states.
The annual report also documents further restrictions imposed by Islamist Taliban authorities on women in Afghanistan. These include bans on the use of textbooks written by women at universities and arrests for violating strict dress codes. HRW now describes the situation as “gender apartheid.”
In Iran, the watchdog considers the current situation particularly dramatic. Alongside the brutal suppression of the latest wave of protests, the organization reported mass arrests and a very high number of executions. The death penalty has also been imposed for drug-related offenses and after politically motivated unfair trials, the report states. Members of ethnic minorities such as Kurds and Arabs have been particularly affected.
Regarding Israel, the group once again condemns “crimes against humanity, genocide, and ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians in Gaza.
According to the group, Israeli authorities “intensified their crimes” in 2025, particularly through the “killing, maiming, starving, and forcible displacement of Palestinians, and the destruction of their homes, schools, and infrastructure on a scale unseen in the recent history of Israel and Palestine.”
Israel, with the support of Washington, angrily rejected the accusation of genocide first raised by Human Rights Watch in December 2024.
The report does not mention Croatia, Slovenia, or Austria, and among countries in the region it highlights Serbia, with 84 cases of physical attacks and 113 threats against journalists, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is cited for the slow prosecution of war crimes. For both countries, the report also points to insufficient accessibility of content for persons with disabilities.
Hungary’s government is said to have intensified its attack on the rule of law in 2025, prompting growing domestic and international criticism. Constitutional amendments banned public LGBT events, including Budapest Pride, but local authorities and record crowds defied the restrictions. In May, parliament submitted a draft law on “transparency of public life,” allowing the government to cut funding and dissolve any organization it designates as a “threat to Hungarian sovereignty.”
Italy is accused of operating a repressive model of migration control.
The 529-page report sharply contrasts with the human rights report recently published by the U.S. State Department, which softened sections devoted to countries friendly to Donald Trump, such as El Salvador.
“With the first year of Trump’s second term, history is accelerating in the wrong direction: all the gains and hard-won progress of recent decades are now at risk,” warned Philippe Bolopion, Human Rights Watch’s director, in an interview with AFP.
Human Rights Watch notes that gang violence has “significantly declined” in the country, but that authorities committed “widespread abuses in 2025, including mass arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture and ill-treatment of detainees, and violations of the right to a fair trial.”
According to Human Rights Watch, the response must come from a “new alliance, a strategic alliance” of “middle powers” united around a “shared core of democratic values” and respect for international law, such as Canada, European Union countries, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, South Korea, and Australia.
“To counter this trend, governments that still value human rights, together with social movements, civil society, and international institutions, must form a strategic alliance to push back,” Bolopion told dpa.
The report also notes a regression in the rights of gay and transgender people over the past year, including in Hungary and the United States.
Foto: Wikimedia/Gage Skidmore – Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic – CC-BY-SA-2.0
