Human Rights Crossroads 2025
- Editorial Staff
- May 23, 2025
- 9 min read
At the Edge of the Abyss: Human Rights Report 2025
Prepared: April, 2025
Author: Strategic Analysis Unit – CEPRODE EUROPE
Download the full report here:
Executive Summary
This report takes stock of the state of the international human rights system at the opening of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. Drawing on events between 2015 and early 2025, it finds that the world has entered a perilous phase of accelerated authoritarianism, widening inequality and escalating conflict. From the live-streamed destruction of Gaza to the assault on multilateral courts, governments are rewriting—or outright ignoring—the rules designed to protect human dignity after the Second World War.
Yet the picture is not solely bleak. Civil - society networks, progressive states and a reinvigorated global youth movement are testing new forms of collective action. This report maps both the hazards and the possibilities. It concludes with a rights-based agenda for reversing the slide into impunity and building a more equitable, sustainable future.
The document is organised in ten thematic chapters that analyse major trends— democratic decay, armed conflict, double standards in justice, shrinking civic space, the climate emergency, poverty and displacement, and gender-based oppression—followed by recommendations for governments, intergovernmental bodies, companies and communities. Readers will find factual summaries, case studies and forward-looking proposals designed to inform advocacy, policy-making and public debate.
1. A World at the Crossroads
Exactly eighty years after the founding of the United Nations, the promise of ‘never again’ faces its sternest test. The post-war architecture of treaties, courts and norms that once gave legal expression to the moral outrage of genocide is being dismantled in real time. Economic shocks, a catastrophic pandemic and unregulated digital platforms have combined to produce fertile soil for nationalist populists. Authoritarian leaders have learned to harness grievance and fear, trimming the discourse of universal rights to the dimensions of ethnic, religious or ideological in-groups.
President Trump’s reelection in January 2025 did not create these dynamics, but it has turbo-charged them. His opening-hundred-day blitz of executive orders— from re-imposing the travel ban to sanctioning senior International Criminal Court (ICC) officials—signals open season on the international rule of law. Other powerful states have drawn similar conclusions: if the United States need not comply with its own signature on the Genocide Convention, why should anyone else?
At the same time, mass movements—from Warsaw and Buenos Aires to Nairobi and Seoul—have demonstrated that democratic aspirations remain vibrant. The contest now under way is not simply an era of change; it is a struggle over what the coming era will be.
2. A Decade of Democratic Decay
The slow unraveling of liberal democracy did not begin with a single election result. Over the past ten years, more than seventy states have enacted legislation that curbs the freedoms of association, assembly and expression. ‘Foreign agent’ laws choke funding for independent watchdogs; anti-terror statutes are wielded to silence climate activists and minority dissent. According to the CIVICUS Monitor, barely three per cent of the world’s population now lives in countries it categorises as ‘open’.
Economic policy choices have sharpened the fracture lines. Between 2015 and 2024 the combined net worth of the world’s billionaires more than doubled, while the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by just three percentage points—an anaemic advance soon reversed by the pandemic. COVID-19 laid bare a hierarchy of human worth: ventilators were hoarded, vaccine patents enforced, and health-care workers in the Global South were applauded yet left unprotected.
The erosion of democratic safeguards, festering inequality and the algorithmic amplification of disinformation form a self-reinforcing triad. By 2023, eight of the ten countries registering the sharpest back-sliding on the Freedom in the World index were also the most unequal in their region. The lesson is stark: unaccountable power and economic insecurity travel together.
3. Gaza: Genocide in the Spotlight
On 7 October 2023 Hamas perpetrated brutal attacks that left over 1,100 Israeli civilians dead and took more than 250 hostages. Israel’s response, however, exceeded every proportionality threshold recognised in international humanitarian law. By the end of 2024 more than 34,000 Palestinians—two thirds of them women and children—had been killed; entire urban districts were reduced to concrete dust. Hospitals were bombed despite precise GPS coordinates shared with the Israel Defense Forces. Internet black-outs were strategically timed to coincide with major ground operations, obstructing real-time evidence gathering.
What made Gaza unprecedented was not only the scale of violence but the live-streamed nature of its unfolding. Drone footage, TikTok clips and satellite imagery offered irrefutable proof of probable war crimes in the moment they occurred. Yet Security Council resolutions demanding a cease-fire were vetoed three times by the United States, and arms transfers from Washington, Berlin and London continued unabated. When South Africa filed a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging breach of the Genocide Convention, Israel dismissed the Court’s provisional measures as ‘political theatre’.
The episode crystallises the crisis of enforcement at the heart of the legal order. When leading democracies treat international law as optional, they license despots everywhere to do the same.
4. Wars Without Rules: Ukraine, Sudan and Beyond
While Gaza dominated headlines, other conflicts raged largely beyond the spotlight. In Ukraine, Russia intensified missile strikes on civilian energy infrastructure throughout 2024, disabling more than half of the country’s thermal-power capacity and plunging millions into winter blackouts. In Sudan, the power struggle between the army and Rapid Support Forces produced the world’s fastest-growing displacement crisis, with 9 million people forced from their homes and famine looming in Darfur.
From Myanmar’s brutal counter-insurgency to the jihadist insurgencies tearing through Burkina Faso and Niger, the pattern is grimly consistent: indiscriminate attacks, starvation used as a weapon of war, and a lucrative trade in small arms that overrides embargo calls. A 2024 analysis by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that global arms transfers rose eight per cent year-on-year, with Middle-Eastern and Sahelian states the chief destinations.
The cumulative toll is staggering. The United Nations recorded more conflict-related civilian deaths in 2024 than at any point since the Rwandan genocide in 1994—and that figure excludes indirect deaths from hunger and disease. The Geneva Conventions are fraying not at the edges but along every seam.
5. Justice Undermined: The Two-Tier System
International justice made historic strides in 2024 when the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas military commander Mohammed Al-Masri. The move was hailed as the Court’s ‘Nuremberg moment’—proof that no one, however powerful, is above the law. Yet within days, U.S. senators threatened sanctions against ICC officials, and in March 2025 President Trump signed an executive order freezing their assets and banning their entry into the United States.
The contrast with Western support for the ICC’s earlier warrant against President Vladimir Putin over the deportation of Ukrainian children could not be starker. The message: accountability is for adversaries, impunity for allies. Such double standards erode the legitimacy of the Court and embolden states to withdraw or refuse cooperation. Already, Kenya and the Philippines have signalled their intent to reconsider their ICC membership.
Multilateral forums fare no better. Budget cuts and political interference have hollowed out the Human Rights Council’s special-procedures system. The Security Council remains paralysed by veto politics, even as its membership expansion stall drags into its fourth decade. Unless leading democracies align their words with deeds, the infrastructure of universal justice may soon exist only on paper.
6. Free Speech in Free Fall
Freedom of expression has long been the canary in the mine of rising despotism. In 2024 that canary fell silent in country after country. At least twenty-one states adopted or debated legislation criminalising ‘misinformation’. In Russia, YouTube journalism was outlawed under wartime censorship statutes; in India, a new Press and Registration Bill granted government officials sweeping powers to shut down ‘unregistered’ digital outlets.
Civil disobedience met with unprecedented repression. University students staging Gaza solidarity encampments from Paris to Chicago were kettled, teargassed and charged under anti-terror laws. In Uganda climate activist Vanessa Nakate was detained for ‘subversion’ after chaining herself to the gates of a coal plant. The transnational backlash against environmental protest suggests convergence between fossil-fuel interests and illiberal politics.
The year also proved the deadliest for media workers since records began. The Committee to Protect Journalists documented 124 killings, nearly two-thirds of them Palestinian reporters operating in Gaza’s lethally compressed killing fields. Impunity remains near total: fewer than one per cent of journalist murders over the past decade have resulted in convictions.
7. Climate Catastrophe and Energy Politics
For the first time in recorded history the calendar year 2024 logged a global mean temperature 1.52°C above the pre-industrial baseline. South Asia endured three consecutive heat waves with ‘wet-bulb’ readings exceeding the threshold for human survivability. In the Amazon, fire fronts consumed 3.3 million hectares of rain forest, releasing carbon stores equal to France’s annual emissions. The climate crisis is no longer a forecast; it is a lived reality.
Yet the collective response borders on the surreal. COP29, hosted in Baku, produced a finance package so laced with loan conditionalities that twenty two vulnerable states issued a joint statement warning of a ‘new debt trap’. President Trump’s day-two announcement of the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was greeted with applause by the delegations of Saudi Arabia, Russia and Australia—each heavily dependent on fossil-fuel rents.
Domestically, the Trump administration opened 11.2 million acres of federal land to oil and gas leasing, including tracts overlapping Native American sacred sites. Taken together, these measures make global compliance with the 1.5°C limit mathematically impossible without a future deployment of negative emission technologies that remain speculative at scale.
8. Poverty, Displacement and Xenophobia
The World Bank’s 2024 report, “Poverty, Prosperity and Planet”, warned that the decade to 2030 risks becoming a ‘lost decade’ for poverty reduction. Armed conflict, economic shocks and climate-driven disasters pushed the number of forcibly displaced people to a record 110 million. Food price inflation averaged 31 per cent in low income countries, yet donor contributions to the World Food Programme fell by a quarter.
Instead of addressing root causes, politicians from Texas to Tuscany weaponised the suffering of migrants. Marine push backs became standard practice in the Mediterranean, and the United Kingdom’s ‘Rwanda solution’—declaring asylum claims inadmissible and transferring claimants to Kigali—sparked a race to the bottom in deterrence models. Courts that ruled such schemes unlawful were overruled or ignored through emergency legislation.
Xenophobic rhetoric moved from fringe to mainstream. In August 2024 the Australian parliament passed the Border Integrity Act, authorizing the navy to ‘turn back or detain’ vessels within a 1,000 kilometre zone. By year’s end, at least 64 migrants had died after being forcibly returned to Indonesia in unseaworthy boats.
9. Gender and LGBTQ+ Rights Under Siege
Half the world’s population continues to experience rights roll backs rooted in patriarchal control of bodies and labor. In Afghanistan the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice effectively erased women from public life, banning female students above grade six and prohibiting women’s employment in all but the health sector. Enforcement relied on lashings, house raids and forced disappearances of protest leaders.
In Iran, ‘Hijab and Chastity’ legislation introduced floggings and prison sentences of up to ten years for unveiled women, while vigilante assaults escalated with impunity. LGBTQ+ people faced outlaw status in a growing number of jurisdictions: Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act 2024 reintroduced the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality’, and Russia expanded its so called ‘LGBT propaganda’ ban to all content accessible to adults.
The counter currents nevertheless exist. Poland adopted a consent based definition of rape, and Bulgaria’s parliament rejected a foreign agent bill modelled on the Kremlin template. In the Philippines the unexpected hand over of former president Rodrigo Duterte to the ICC signalled that gender based crimes in his ‘war on drugs’ may yet face scrutiny.
10. Routes to Renewal: A Rights-Based Agenda
History is replete with inflection points where regression seemed unstoppable until organized resistance proved otherwise. The diplomatic calendar of 2024 offered scattered but genuine breakthroughs: the UN General Assembly voted to commence negotiations on a treaty governing crimes against humanity; it also mandated a Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation that could curb the revenue drain feeding inequality. Grass roots victories, from The Gambia’s rejection of efforts to legalize female genital mutilation to municipal climate-debt swaps in the Caribbean, demonstrate that policy space exists even in adverse conditions.
To convert these sparks into systemic change, this report advances five priority actions:
“Close the accountability gap.” States must ratify and domesticate the Rome Statute, fully fund the ICC and shield it from political retaliation.
“Protect civic space.” Repeal ‘foreign agent’ and ‘fake news’ laws that violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; establish rapid response mechanisms for detained human-rights defenders.
“Decarbonize with justice.” Enact binding fossil fuel phase out schedules and create a Loss and Damage Fund capitalized by progressive taxation of corporate windfall profits.
“Guarantee economic rights.” Adopt a universal social protection floor financed through the proposed UN tax framework and a 0.5 per cent financial transaction levy.
“Advance gender equality.” Ratify ILO Convention 190 on workplace violence, decriminalize abortion, and prohibit so called ‘conversion therapy’.
The coming years will test whether international society can reinvent solidarity at a scale commensurate with the crises we face.
Conclusion: Defending the Future of Rights
The world stands at an existential fork in the road. One path leads towards the consolidation of a neo authoritarian order where might defines right, surveillance supplants citizenship and planetary boundaries are ignored until they collapse. The other path—equally plausible—leads to a renewed social contract anchored in universal rights, ecological stewardship and shared prosperity.
Neither outcome is predetermined. The decisive factor will be collective action by states, cities, corporations and, above all, ordinary people who refuse to accept the alleged inevitability of decline. This report has traced the contours of the crisis and sketched a blueprint for action. The task now is to transform analysis into mobilization, and mobilization into lasting institutional change. The window is narrow but still open.
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