Amnesty International slams ‘predatory world order’ led by US and Israel

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - LONDON — Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnes Callamard has said ‘voracious predators’ like the United States, Israel and Russia have waged war on civilians with impunity and destroyed the international order based on global human rights.

The world is on the brink of a perilous new era, driven by assaults on multilateralism, international law and human rights by powerful states, corporations and anti-rights movements, the head of the global rights group warned on Tuesday.

The heads of Israel, Russia and the United States are leading the destruction of global human rights, Callamard said, describing them as “voracious predators” intent upon economic and political domination.

“A global environment where primitive ferocity could flourish has been long in the making,” Callamard wrote in an annual report on the state of the world’s human rights that was released on Tuesday.

In 2025, “sharp U-turns were taken away from the international order that had been imagined out of the ashes of the Holocaust and the utter destruction of world wars, and constructed slowly and painfully, albeit insufficiently, over these past 80 years,” she said.

In a news conference in London on Monday, Callamard said that most governments tend to appease the “predators” rather than confront them.
“Some even thought to imitate the bullies and the looters,” she said.

States, international bodies and civil society must reject the politics of appeasement and collectively resist these attacks to prevent this new order from taking hold, the organization said in the report, "The State of the World’s Human Rights," which assessed the human rights situation in 144 countries.

Spain, however, which is an outlier in Europe for its criticism of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and US-Israeli attacks on Iran, “is standing above the double standard that is destroying the international system”, Callamard said.

She argued that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who in 2022 sent his forces into neighboring Ukraine, have had an “absolutely dramatic” impact on the world.

Their conduct is “emboldening all of those that are tempted by similar behaviours,” said Callamard. “It is allowing for the multiplication of copycats around the world, and therefore what we are confronting now is much more aggressive and ferocious than what we had to confront three or four years ago,” she added.

“We are confronting the most challenging moment of our age. Humanity is under attack from transnational anti-rights movements and predatory governments determined to assert their dominance through unlawful wars and brazen economic blackmail,” said Callamard.

“For years, Amnesty International has denounced the gradual disintegration of human rights in every part of the world, warning of the consequences of flagrant rule-breaking by governments and corporate actors. We’ve also demonstrated time and again how double standards and selective compliance with international law have weakened the multilateral system and accountability.

“What marks this moment as fundamentally different is that we’re no longer documenting erosion around the system’s edges. This is a direct assault on the foundations of human rights and the international rules-based order by the most powerful actors for the purpose of control, impunity and profit.

“The spiralling conflict in the Middle East is a product of this descent into lawlessness. Following the initial unlawful US-Israeli attacks in violation of the UN Charter, which triggered Iran’s indiscriminate retaliation, the conflict has quickly morphed into an open warfare against civilians and civilian infrastructure, exacerbating the already catastrophic suffering of people across the region.

It is now engulfing countries around the world, impacting populations everywhere, and threatening the livelihood of millions. This is what happens when the norms, institutions and legal framework painstakingly built to safeguard humanity are hollowed out for the purpose of domination.”

Amnesty’s review of the state of the world’s human rights makes for grim reading, documenting attacks on fundamental civil liberties in most nations.

“Authoritarian practices have intensified worldwide”, the report reads, before running through abuses alleged in countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe in 400 pages. — Agencies