Annual Report - Global analysis - Amnesty International

Amnesty International documented widespread violations by governments and other actors, failures of accountability and systemic injustices in 2025, alongside limited areas of progress. Many of these patterns have continued into 2026, as the international rules-based order faces sustained attack.

Crimes under international law have been committed extensively. They include Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, Russia’s crimes against humanity in Ukraine and war crimes and other crimes under international law in Myanmar, Sudan and other conflicts. Irresponsible arms transfers have continued to fuel atrocities, although activism and legal pressure have led some states to restrict or ban arms exports to Israel. The United States of America (USA) and Russia undermined international accountability mechanisms, particularly the International Criminal Court (ICC), in 2025, while several other states announced their withdrawal from the Rome Statute. Nonetheless, the ICC and other mechanisms secured notable arrests and convictions and new investigative bodies, including a special tribunal on the crime of aggression against Ukraine, were created.

Authoritarian practices have intensified worldwide. The governments of Afghanistan, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Kenya, the United Kingdom (UK), the USA and Venezuela, among other countries, violently repressed protests, criminalized dissent through counterterrorism and security laws or used enforced disappearances, executions and abusive policing tactics in 2025. Torture and ill‑treatment, including through electric shock weapons, remained widespread, although momentum grew for a United Nations (UN) Torture‑Free Trade Treaty.

Discrimination has been a central theme. Refugees and migrants have faced mass deportations and racially discriminatory policies, while people displaced across international borders in the context of climate change have remained largely unprotected. Racial injustice linked to colonialism and extractive industries have persisted, alongside calls for reparations. Gender‑based violence and restrictions on women’s rights were pervasive. While there were legal advances in a few countries to expand abortion rights and prohibit child marriage in 2025, existing barriers to access abortion and post-abortion care remained in place. Meanwhile, the onslaught of attacks on a range of rights of LGBTI people, especially transgender people, increased across the world.

Governments have failed to phase out fossil fuels, while climate finance and adaptation support have fallen far short of what is needed. Debt, aid cuts and unfair global economic structures have undermined economic and social rights. Corporate abuses, including environmental harm, labour rights abuses and the use of lawsuits, continued in 2025, while a landmark new European Union (EU) corporate due diligence regulation was watered down.

Finally, governments have used technology to enable and strengthen authoritarian practices. Governments, facilitated by corporate actors, have deployed unlawful surveillance to restrict the right to freedom of expression or repress protests. While human rights harms associated with social media platforms and the rising number of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools were increasingly understood in 2025, regulation lagged behind.

Crimes under international law

Genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes

Israel committed genocide, as well as multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity, against Palestinians in Gaza; the genocide continued beyond a ceasefire with Hamas on 9 October 2025. Its system of apartheid against all Palestinians also took a heavy toll, particularly in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, through high-intensity military operations and a sharp increase in state-backed settler violence. Mass protests against Israel’s genocide spread around the world. A wide range of organizations, international bodies and states acknowledged that Israel was committing genocide. Nevertheless, in general, the world’s most powerful governments failed to take meaningful action to stop the genocide or to bring an end to Israel’s unlawful occupation and apartheid.

Russia committed crimes against humanity and war crimes, including through its widespread practice of enforced disappearances, torture and reported drone targeting of Ukrainian civilians. It intensified aerial attacks targeting critical civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. Reports of Russian forces extrajudicially executing Ukrainian prisoners of war mounted. In the territories it occupied, Russia also took measures to suppress non-Russian identities. Outside of armed conflict, Venezuela’s widespread practice of enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions and torture against dissidents and others similarly amounted to crimes against humanity.

Parties to conflicts in numerous other countries committed acts that amounted to war crimes. Government forces, allied militias and opposing armed groups were responsible for killing thousands of civilians in total. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), several armed groups unlawfully killed hundreds of civilians; one also attacked hospitals and abducted patients and caregivers. In Myanmar, the military used motorized paragliders to drop explosive munitions on villages and other sites, killing dozens of civilians, including children; it also blocked aid to resistance-held areas. In Sudan, the Sudanese Armed Forces and their allies killed dozens of civilians in reprisal for their suspected collaboration with the opposing Rapid Support Forces, which also carried out unlawful killings of civilians, including mass killings during attacks on North Darfur. Reports of unlawful attacks and killings by government forces and armed groups continued in other long-standing conflicts in Africa, including in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia and South Sudan. In Syria, government-affiliated militias perpetrated a wave of mass killings of hundreds of civilians, including sectarian-based killings.

The UN and other bodies recorded thousands of cases of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence in countries including CAR, the DRC, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan. In Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces used sexual violence in a widespread and systematic manner to humiliate, punish and displace women; the Sudanese Armed Forces also committed sexual violence, including rape, against women and men.

Governments should take meaningful action to stop genocide and collaborate in UN and other forums to address and prevent all crimes under international law.

Irresponsible arms transfers and production

Risking complicity, states continued to carry out and facilitate irresponsible arms transfers, including to actors implicated in the commission of crimes under international law. The USA led the provision of massive military support to Israel. The United Arab Emirates provided arms, including advanced Chinese weaponry and armoured personnel carriers, to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, which the group used in Darfur.

Pressure on states and arms companies has increased and has had some effect. In the years prior to 2025, Belgium, Canada, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, among other states, had taken some measures to reduce arms supplies to Israel, although they often limited their actions to refusing to authorize new arms export licences while still supplying weapons under old licences; 2025 saw further progress. In Belgium, a court ruled that the Flanders region halt all trans-shipment of arms to Israel, following a ban on arms exports there from its Wallonia region. In Germany, the government announced it would not authorize new export licences to Israel for arms that could be used in Gaza although it subsequently lifted the suspension of arms exports to Israel. In Slovenia, although there have been implementation issues, the government announced it would ban all arms trade with Israel, including transit and imports. In Spain, a comprehensive arms embargo to Israel was enshrined into law. The Hague Group, a bloc of states committed to “coordinated legal and diplomatic measures” in defence of international law and solidarity with the people of Palestine, comprising Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa, committed to halting all arms trade with Israel. Global activism against the flow of arms to Israel grew; countrywide strikes in Italy and actions by dockworkers in France, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Spain and Sweden, for instance, aimed to disrupt arms shipment routes to Israel.

However, some states withdrew, or signalled their intention to withdraw, from their commitments relating to banned weapons in 2025. Lithuania withdrew from the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the first state to do so since its adoption in 2008. Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland notified the UN of their intention to withdraw from the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction (the Ottawa Treaty), citing threats from Russia. Officials in Finland and Poland said that their countries would resume domestic production of anti-personnel mines. Ukraine communicated to the UN its intention to suspend the operation of the Ottawa Treaty, against the provisions of the convention itself. Nevertheless, most states recognized the humanitarian, legal and ethical concerns relating to AI and autonomy in weapons systems. In the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, 156 states voted in favour of a resolution calling for work to be completed on elements needed for an international instrument on autonomous weapons systems with a view to future negotiations.

States and companies should stop all irresponsible arms transfers, including all transfers to Israel.¹ States should recommit to the Convention on Cluster Munitions and the Ottawa Treaty and negotiate a treaty prohibiting certain autonomous weapon systems and strictly controlling the use of systems that can be used lawfully.

Impunity

Some states, including Russia and the USA, attacked or undermined international accountability mechanisms in 2025. Most damagingly, the USA issued sanctions against prosecutors and judges of the ICC, as well as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and multiple Palestinian human rights organizations, with an intention to impede the ICC’s work and to shield Israeli and US nationals from accountability. Russian domestic courts issued arrest warrants against ICC officials. Other states did essentially nothing to protect these individuals and organizations, or the ICC itself. The EU chose not to activate its blocking statute, a legal instrument to counteract the extraterritorial application of foreign laws that affect EU entities, in response. ICC member states Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger announced their intention to withdraw from the Rome Statute, while Hungary went a step further and submitted a formal notification of its withdrawal in 2026. Several ICC member states, including Hungary, Italy and Tajikistan failed to implement ICC arrest warrants.

Nevertheless, international mechanisms continued important work towards accountability. The ICC issued arrest warrants against two Taliban leaders for the crime against humanity of gender-based persecution against women, girls and LGBTI people since their return to power in Afghanistan in 2021, as well as unsealing warrants against Libyan nationals accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The former president of the Philippines was surrendered to the ICC following the implementation of its arrest warrant against him for the crime against humanity of murder, in relation to killings in the “war on drugs”. In December, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber confirmed 39 charges brought by the Office of the Prosecutor against Joseph Kony, founder and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. In the same month, Germany surrendered to the ICC Khaled Mohamed Ali El Hishri, a senior member of a powerful Libyan militia who was the subject of an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity and war crimes, in relation to abuses at the notorious Mitiga prison in Libya’s capital, Tripoli. The ICC convicted a leader of the Janjaweed militia for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in 2003-2004 during brutal attacks in Darfur, Sudan. The Special Criminal Court, a hybrid court in CAR, convicted six former members of an armed group for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in relation to the killing of dozens and the displacement of hundreds of others during an attack by the group in 2020.

Meanwhile, new mechanisms were established. The Council of Europe established the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine with the aim of investigating and prosecuting senior government and military leaders from Russia and other states who were responsible for this crime in Ukraine. While the ICC has issued arrest warrants for six Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, it lacks jurisdiction to prosecute the crime of aggression in Ukraine. The UN Human Rights Council established an independent investigative mechanism for Afghanistan.

Governments should support and protect the ICC, including by activating or enacting blocking statutes to protect ICC officials and others involved in ICC-related work from threats and sanctions. They should ensure that ICC arrest warrants are enforced against state officials without claims of immunity from prosecution for their crimes.²

Punitive and authoritarian practices

Repression of dissent

Around the world, state officials and other powerful actors relied on a range of authoritarian practices to silence civil society and evade accountability. Many states used unlawful force to repress protests expressing political and socio-economic grievances in 2025. In Tanzania, a crackdown on participants in post-election protests resulted in the death of hundreds of people. In Nepal, the repression of youth-led protests against corruption and a social media ban left 76 people dead, including protesters and police officers. In Iran, during protests that began on 28 December in the capital, Tehran, and quickly spread nationwide, security forces unlawfully used rifles and shotguns loaded with metal pellets against protesters, leading to killings and injuries. Deaths of protesters resulting from the unlawful use of force were also documented in countries including Angola, Cameroon, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Pakistan, Peru and Türkiye. Police relied, in some countries, on inadequately regulated forms of weaponry, such as long-range acoustic devices in Serbia, and, in many countries, on the reckless deployment of tear gas.

Some states, including Afghanistan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, China, Cuba, Mali, Myanmar, Nicaragua, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Uganda and Venezuela, employed enforced disappearances against human rights defenders, activists, journalists and others as a tool to instil fear. Other states, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, pursued the death penalty as a tool to both instil fear and give a false impression of security and strong government.³

Some governments abused counterterrorism and national security laws in 2025 to punish opponents, human rights defenders and other activists for dissent, including peaceful acts of civil disobedience. In Egypt, authorities referred thousands of people to trial on terrorism-related offences, many of whom were targeted solely for the peaceful exercise of their human rights. In India and the Chinese administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, authorities used national security and counterterrorism laws expansively to detain human rights defenders and activists. In Venezuela, at least 806 people continued to be arbitrarily detained, many of them forcibly disappeared as the government maintained its policy of repression against any real or perceived dissent. In Tunisia, authorities subjected political opponents to politically motivated mass trials and punitive sentences of up to 45 years’ imprisonment under counterterrorism or cybercrime laws. In the UK, authorities proscribed Palestine Action, a direct-action network opposing the UK’s involvement in Israel’s military operations, based on vague counterterrorism laws; more than 2,000 people were arrested across the UK simply for peacefully opposing the ban. They also prosecuted 16 activists from Just Stop Oil, an environmental activist coalition, for participating in various acts of civil disobedience aimed at halting the expansion of fossil fuel extraction, leading to prison sentences ranging from five months to five years. In the USA, authorities targeted foreign students expressing support for Palestinians for arrest and deportation and arrested those protesting against a crackdown by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on undocumented migrants.

Governments should stop cracking down on and criminalizing dissent, including peaceful acts of civil disobedience. They should ensure accountability for all violations committed in the context of protests and guarantee effective remedies to victims.

Abusive law enforcement

Many states were guilty of flouting international human rights law in law enforcement situations during 2025. Some resorted to state-sponsored killings. In September, the US military began bombing boats and openly committing extrajudicial executions in Latin America, the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean based on allegations that the targets were “narco-terrorists” smuggling drugs. In October, civil and military police in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, conducted an anti-drug operation in favelas that left more than 120 people dead, most of them Black and living in poverty, with multiple reports of extrajudicial executions. International safeguards and restrictions on the use of the death penalty have also been frequently flouted in the name of security amid increases in executions for drug-related offences.

Across the world, law enforcement agencies also employed techniques that amounted to torture or other ill-treatment. Some used direct contact electric shock weapons, including stun guns and electric shock batons, on the street, at borders, in migrant and refugee detention centres, mental health institutions, police stations, prisons and other places of detention. These inherently abusive devices, which deliver painful shocks at the press of a button, have been used against protesters, students, political opponents, women and girls (including pregnant women), children and human rights defenders, among others. Survivors have suffered burns, numbness, miscarriage, urinary dysfunction, insomnia, exhaustion and profound psychological trauma. States and companies continued to manufacture, promote and sell such equipment. There has also been widespread abuse of projectile electric shock weapons, which can have a legitimate role in law enforcement, but which have often been used in acts of torture and other ill-treatment, underlining the need for strict, human rights-based trade controls on standard law enforcement equipment.⁴

Encouragingly, however, pressure for a UN Torture-Free Trade Treaty grew in 2025. In June, the four UN anti-torture mechanisms used a call for more responsible and accountable policing of protests to back proposals to develop the treaty. Similarly, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted a decision encouraging its 46 member states to support the development of an international legally binding instrument on torture-free trade. In July, the EU extended the scope of goods covered by its pioneering Anti-Torture Regulation, strengthening its region-wide measures preventing the transfer of law enforcement equipment to those who would use it for torture and other ill-treatment worldwide.⁵

Governments should stop state-sponsored killings, including those carried out in the name of security. They should redouble efforts to prohibit inherently abusive law enforcement equipment and impose human rights-based trade controls on standard law equipment by supporting the negotiation of a UN Torture-Free Trade Treaty.

Discrimination

Violations of refugees’ and migrants’ rights

Governments across the world have engaged in authoritarian practices in the context of asylum and migration. Some have authorized unlawful measures or circumvented legislative processes to institute harmful migration policies. In 2025, the USA and European states including Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy and Poland, as well as other countries, adopted or enforced extreme measures to carry out deportations and other types of return and prevent irregular arrivals of refugees and migrants, in violation of their human rights obligations. Iran and Pakistan forced the return of or deported more than 1.8 million and 990,000 Afghans respectively, despite ongoing Taliban abuses. Between December 2024 and February 2025, the Ethiopian authorities forcibly returned more than 600 Eritreans to Eritrea, where the government regarded their asylum claims as evidence of treason.

Governments often portray their migration policies and asylum systems as neutral tools to assert state sovereignty, pursue national security and economic interest or avoid excessive burden on public resources. However, the legacies of colonialism and slavery continue to shape systems, laws, policies and practices that discriminate, directly or indirectly, against racialized people around the world. In 2025, Amnesty International denounced systematic practices of structural racism in relation to the asylum and migration policies of several countries, including Canada, the Dominican Republic, France, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the USA, as well as, more generally, European countries in the Schengen area.⁶ In some cases, governments used digital technologies to reinforce border regimes that discriminate based on race, ethnicity or national origin.⁷ Gender-based discrimination sometimes compounded the concerns; in the Dominican Republic, pregnant and breastfeeding Haitian women were deported directly from hospitals.

Governments across the world have generally failed to protect those who are displaced across international borders in the context of climate change. Almost none issued visas dedicated to allowing people to safely migrate from areas particularly affected by climate change. Instead, they force people to navigate existing procedures and pathways that are often discriminatory and restrictive. People most affected include racialized and poor communities, women and other marginalized groups. Older people, people with disabilities and people with medical conditions are often left behind, since they are unable to meet visa requirements, as evidenced in the case of people leaving the Pacific islands of Tuvalu and Kiribati for Aotearoa New Zealand.

Governments should abolish or reform systems of tied visas and precarious residence permits that are discriminatory and exploitative, prevent digital technologies from reinforcing discriminatory border enforcement practices and establish legal frameworks to protect persons displaced in the context of climate change.⁸

Racial discrimination

Across regions, governments have used racist and discriminatory rhetoric when engaging in authoritarian practices in the context of asylum and migration, as well as the repression of dissent and law enforcement. Many countries also reported a rise in hate crimes. In an effort to address the root causes of racial discrimination, affected communities across the world have been campaigning for reparations for historical injustices inherited from colonialism and slavery and their contemporary impact. In 2025, designated by the African Union as the Year for Reparations, the pioneering festival Wakati Wetu convened hundreds of participants – artists, musicians, policymakers, philanthropists, activists and cultural educators – to examine the enduring legacy of the slave trade and colonialism and advance a discourse of reparatory justice. Meanwhile, with 2025 also marking the bicentenary of France’s imposition of the “independence debt”, which compelled Haiti to compensate the former colonial power for the loss of profits from enslaved labour, activists and organizations from Haiti and its diaspora urged France to provide reparations and otherwise confront its colonial past in the country.

In 2025, the governments of Bolivia, Canada and Ecuador, among other countries, expanded extractive projects in Indigenous Peoples’ territories without consulting them in procedures that met international standards on free, prior and informed consent. Indigenous Peoples, often dependent for their cultures and livelihoods on ecosystems, have used legal and political channels to campaign for reparations for the harms of such land expropriation, as well as of colonization and extermination. In one notable case in 2025, the Avá Guaraní Paranaense Indigenous People achieved – after more than 40 years of struggle – some redress for the dispossession and flooding of their land. The company created by the Brazilian and Paraguayan governments to construct and operate the hydroelectric dam that caused the harms was judicially ordered to finance the purchase of 3,000 hectares of land for affected communities.

Governments of states that engaged in or profited from historical injustices such as colonialism, the slave trade and slavery should implement appropriate reparatory justice measures. The measures should not only provide redress for the injustices, but also dismantle contemporary structures and systems of racial discrimination and inequality.

Gender-based discrimination and violence

Women and girls across the world experienced gender-based violence, as well as barriers to protection, justice and remedy, that were sometimes compounded by discrimination on other grounds, including migration status, caste, work, class or religion. In Afghanistan, Taliban decrees banned women from education, work and free movement and fuelled gender-based violence and child marriage. In Nepal, instances of gender-based violence against Dalit women were not investigated. In Syria, Alawite families reporting the abduction of women and girls by unidentified armed men were dismissed. In the Americas, women and girls continued to face alarming levels of violence, including femicides; in Argentina, despite one femicide being recorded approximately every 35 hours, the government eliminated 13 key gender-based violence prevention and response programmes. In Georgia, misogynistic and sexist rhetoric from senior officials was accompanied by gendered abuse against women protesters, including threats of sexual assault and degrading full strip searches. In positive developments, new laws in Bolivia and Burkina Faso prohibited child marriage for girls, as well as boys.

In 2025, as in previous years, there were advances in a few countries to expand abortion rights. In Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Norway, parliaments passed legislation to improve access to abortion and Luxemburg enshrined abortion as a guaranteed freedom in its constitution. In Malawi, the High Court affirmed the right of girls who had survived sexual violence to seek an abortion. However, in the Dominican Republic, a new law imposed a total ban on abortion. In many other countries across the world, existing barriers to access abortion and post-abortion care remained in place.

The onslaught of attacks on a range of rights of LGBTI people, especially transgender people, increased across the world, often fuelled by various anti-gender actors. In Burkina Faso, a new law criminalized consensual same-sex sexual relations. In Hungary and Slovakia, the national parliaments passed amendments to the constitution that would lead to the recognition of only two genders (male and female) and entrench discrimination against same-sex couples. In Canada, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico and the USA, restrictive laws or policies on the rights of transgender people were implemented. In China, a number of online platforms, websites and discussion portals complied with state censorship directives, silencing individual and group discussions about the rights of LGBTI people, as well as women. People in many states across the Middle East and North Africa were arrested and prosecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity, and some received harsh sentences for consensual same-sex sexual relations. However, court rulings in Japan and Mexico advanced the legal recognition of transgender people.

Governments must end discrimination based on gender and sexuality and implement legal and policy reforms to grant equal and full rights to all women, girls and LGBTI people, including their sexual and reproductive rights. They must ensure all victims and survivors of gender-based violence can access protection, justice and remedy in a timely and effective manner.

Economic and climate injustice

Failure to tackle climate crisis

Food insecurity, forced displacement and destruction of homes and livelihoods caused by disasters made more likely and more intense by climate change, such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, heatwaves and wildfires, have accelerated in countries at all levels of income. As usual it has been those who contributed the least to climate change who have often borne the brunt.

The UN Environment Programme reported in November 2025 that the world is on track to reach roughly 3 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, assuming that countries fulfil the policies they have in place, an increasingly unlikely outcome. For the last few years, governments have done too little to phase out fossil fuels or tackle other key drivers of climate change. In 2025, several governments, including Brazil and Canada, went further, taking significant steps to boost their fossil fuel production and exports, often with taxpayer-funded subsidies. The USA coerced EU members into committing to fossil fuel imports and usage. Only about a third of the parties to the Paris Agreement submitted the required climate action plans (nationally determined contributions) by the 2025 deadline.

In addition to driving climate change, fossil fuels pose significant health risks to the at least 2 billion people living within 5km of more than 18,000 operating fossil fuel infrastructure sites distributed across 170 countries around the world. Of these, more than 520 million are estimated to be children. At least 463 million people are living within 1km of the sites, exposing them to much higher environmental and health risks.⁹

Leaders at the climate change conference in Brazil in November 2025, COP30, failed to build on or even to reaffirm the commitment to “transition away” from fossil fuels agreed upon at COP28. They also failed to deliver scaled-up grants-based finance that lower-income countries need for adaptation.¹⁰ Climate finance provision is an obligation for high-income countries to help lower-income countries adapt to devastating current and future impacts of climate change for which they are not responsible. Needs are estimated to be at least USD 300 billion per year, which governments could fund through fair taxation and the redirection of significant fossil fuel subsidies.¹¹

Against this backdrop, it was important that advisory opinions from two international courts – the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights – affirmed state obligations to protect human beings and the ecosystems on which they rely from climate damage, including the obligation to phase out fossil fuels. In addition, at COP30, the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands announced they would co-host the First International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in April 2026.

Governments should commit to a fast, fair and funded fossil fuel phase-out and a just transition, including by endorsing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and by joining the multilateral effort led by the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands.

Long-standing economic crises and global conflict have overlain these accelerating climate harms and have been worsened by the unjust global economic governance system centred on the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which is no longer fit for purpose, and avoidable decisions by high-income states to defund the realization of economic, social and cultural rights through massive aid cuts.

Inflation has continued to increase the cost of paying debt interest, such that many low- and middle-income countries have suffered from unsustainable debt levels and have been unable to invest in the realization of economic and social rights, including the rights to health, education and social security. Unfair tax systems and the failure to rein in aggressive tax avoidance and evasion by corporate actors and by wealthy individuals have further deprived governments of much needed revenues for the realization of economic and social rights.

Chaotic and abrupt cuts to international development assistance by the USA resulted in the disruption or closure of health programmes and interruptions in access to life-saving medicines in many low-income countries, leading to particular harm for marginalized groups.¹² These cuts, which are part of a broader trend of aid cuts by high-income countries, including European ones, merely increased the already existing gap of nearly USD 25 billion between the funds required for UN appeals and the funds received. People in urgent need of humanitarian aid – estimated at nearly 300 million, many living in conflict zones – have been particularly badly hit by the shortfall, according to analysis issued in May 2025 by the International Rescue Committee; nearly half the population of each of Haiti, South Sudan, Sudan and Yemen suffered from severe hunger, while many others experienced malnutrition.

This is all against a backdrop of lack of sufficient progress on the Sustainable Development Goals, with less than five years to go to meet the 2030 targets. According to a report issued in July 2025 by the UN Secretary-General, just over a third (35%) of targets are on course or advancing moderately, while nearly half (48%) are stagnating. Only 31% are making marginal gains and 17% show no progress at all. Even more troubling, 18% of targets have regressed, falling below their 2015 baseline levels.

The ongoing negotiations for a binding UN tax convention provide an opportunity for states to redress inequities in the global tax system by agreeing on principles that would prevent tax abuse, tax polluters and provide adequate revenue for financing all human rights. Significant progress was made in 2025 to agree the terms of reference, which include the need for the final treaty to align with states’ existing human rights obligations. A similar process and mechanism on debt is urgently needed.

Governments should commit at least 0.7% of gross national income to international aid without discrimination, if in a position to do so; address the debt crisis through timely debt relief for all countries in and at risk of debt distress; and support the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.

Corporate abuses

Corporate actors are continuing to fuel and profit from the world’s crises. These include conflicts in Gaza, Sudan and Myanmar, the global climate crisis and the destruction of critical habitats, as well as countless incidents where companies abuse the rights of workers and people affected by their operations. States are failing to protect the victims of corporate human rights abuses, with the USA even rolling back regulations and gutting key agencies.

The USA has pushed for the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, while hostility to multilateralism, bellicose rhetoric by key world leaders and economic competition with China have fed a security-driven race for minerals, which are important for the transition to renewable energy and for various military uses. This race is expanding the intensive extraction of natural resources, with companies ignoring human rights to maximize their profits. The ensuing costs, including forced evictions, labour rights abuses and pollution of water, soil and air that harms health and agriculture, have been high.

The introduction by the EU of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, a landmark regulation requiring large corporations to respect new rules on human rights, environmental impacts and climate, provided cause for hope; companies in many other countries around the globe would also have to comply with the rules to trade with the EU. The regulation had popular support; polling commissioned by Amnesty International and Global Witness in 2025 found that around three quarters of more than 10,000 respondents in 10 European countries back the directive.¹³ The directive also inspired other states, including Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand, to consider introducing similar rules. However, after lobbying from multinational corporations and other states, including the USA, the European Parliament voted in November 2025 to severely limit its scope.¹⁴

In addition, the proliferation of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) has had a chilling effect on civil society efforts to fight environmental degradation and other wrongdoing by powerful companies. One such lawsuit led to a US court ordering Greenpeace to pay USD 660 million to the fossil fuel company Energy Transfer, posing an existential threat to the international NGO. The court upheld the company’s claims against Greenpeace for opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, which transports crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois, and found Greenpeace liable for defamation, trespassing and nuisance, among other charges. The company has also attempted to prevent Greenpeace from pursuing proceedings in the Netherlands, where both domestic and EU legal frameworks robustly protect against the use of SLAPPs by corporate entities.¹⁵

Governments should introduce tough new rules to prevent companies from abusing human rights and hold to account those which do, also ensuring effective remedy for victims.

Technology and human rights harms

Unlawful surveillance and digital repression

Governments used technology to enable and strengthen authoritarian practices. New investigations in 2025 revealed the scope of deployment of surveillance and censorship tools. Amnesty International uncovered the sale of a commercialized version of China’s Great Firewall, the system of internet censorship and filtering used by the Chinese government to control what information people in China can access online, to the Pakistani government and the US government’s deployment of surveillance tools against student and migrant protesters. Authorities in some countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tanzania and South Sudan, imposed restrictions on internet access to restrict the right to freedom of expression, mostly in the context of protests. In Kenya, authorities systematically deployed technology-facilitated repression tactics, including online intimidation, threats, incitement to hatred and unlawful surveillance, as part of a coordinated and sustained campaign to suppress youth-led protests.

Corporate actors have facilitated these practices. Evidence of attacks using highly invasive spyware from companies such as Intellexa, NSO and Paragon continued to emerge, demonstrating the continuing danger posed by the unregulated market for advanced spyware.

Governments should impose an immediate ban on the use or transfer of highly invasive spyware, and impose a moratorium on the use or transfer of all spyware until such time as a system of safeguards is in place that is capable of protecting against human rights abuses in practice.

Artificial intelligence and human rights harms

The explosion of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, easily accessible to the public, has continued at an unbridled pace, 2025 seeing the release of numerous new models from Big Tech companies, such as Google, Meta and Microsoft, and major AI players, such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Creating and operating the vast physical infrastructure necessary to achieve industry and investor goals on AI, including the building of data centres, has led to increasing exploitation of natural resources, such as minerals for hardware and water for cooling, and of energy. The human rights impacts have included environmental degradation around data centres and the erosion of labour rights. In response, local activism to combat the rampant construction of data centres has surged in countries including Brazil, Ireland, Mexico and the USA. Similarly, workers in the technology sector, from company headquarters in the USA’s Silicon Valley to hubs for outsourced content moderation, data labelling and other support work in Africa and elsewhere, have increasingly organized to campaign for safer working conditions.

Regulation of AI remains inadequate. New governance instruments issued in 2025, such as India’s AI Governance Guidelines, were non-binding or very broad. The EU moved to simplify its corporate accountability and technology-related regulation. It was presented as part of a broader move towards cutting “red tape” and increasing “competitiveness”. However, these moves aim to weaken existing legislative safeguards, such as the EU AI Act, which is designed to ensure that AI systems used in the EU are safe, transparent, non‑discriminatory and respect fundamental rights, and could affect numerous other EU regulatory safeguards.

Governments have continued to invest in digital public infrastructure projects. In 2025, the UK announced a new digital ID system, while the EU has been developing an EU Digital Identity Wallet. This follows a multi-year trend of governments rolling out major digital ID systems, such as Aadhaar in India. These have either accompanied or laid the groundwork for the use of AI in social protection, which has driven inequality. The integration of AI systems into functions like policing, migration and the military has exacerbated human rights violations, particularly for racialized communities.

Governments should enact binding, enforceable and human rights-based regulation to govern AI systems, including a ban on the development and deployment of AI systems that are incompatible with international human rights law.

There has been increasing public understanding of the intersection of the harms of social media and other social issues. Amnesty International contributed to this by analysing the recommender system of social media platform X, taking the example of racist riots in the UK in 2024 following an attack in Southport, England which resulted in the death of three young children.¹⁶ False claims alleging the perpetrator of the attack was a Muslim immigrant or asylum seeker gained significant traction online. As X became a hotspot for racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric, offline violence erupted, with mobs targeting mosques, refugee shelters and Asian, Black and Muslim communities. Meanwhile, X and Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, have significantly cut trust and safety staff – those responsible for keeping the platforms safe, trustworthy and free from harmful behaviour – and rolled back fact-checking programmes.

Many states considered how best to protect children online. Australia issued a new law in 2025 to prohibit children under 16 from using social media, while Malaysia announced plans for a similar blanket ban. While these measures demonstrated commitment to addressing harmful platforms, they restricted young people’s right to express themselves and access information online, while failing to address the underlying root issue, namely that social media platforms expose all users to harms through their relentless pursuit of user engagement and exploitation of people’s personal data. Amnesty International highlighted in 2025 how easily children and young people expressing an interest in mental health could be drawn into “rabbit holes” of depressive and suicidal content on TikTok.¹⁷

More organizations and activists have challenged the large companies that operate social media platforms. In one case against Meta in Kenya that raises significant legal questions regarding Facebook’s algorithmic practices, a significant preliminary victory was registered in 2025. The Kenyan High Court affirmed its jurisdiction to determine constitutional rights violations in the face of a challenge from Meta. The case had been brought by two Ethiopians and the Kenyan Katiba Institute, who allege that Facebook promoted dangerous online content during the armed conflict in Ethiopia in 2020-2022, and has been supported by Amnesty International.¹⁸ The ruling signifies an important step toward ensuring that marginalized communities can access justice regardless of their geographic location and challenges the prevailing notion that countries outside the USA and Europe exist merely as markets for extracting profit.

Social media companies should overhaul their business models to prevent human rights harms and address those impacts when they occur. States should put in place stronger regulation to protect all users and robustly enforce existing regulations.