AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REPORT 2016/17

FOREWORD
“2016 saw the idea of human
dignity and equality, the very
notion of a human family,
coming under vigorous and
relentless assault from
powerful narratives of blame,
fear and scapegoating,
propagated by those who
sought to take or cling on to
power at almost any cost.”
SALIL SHETTY, SECRETARY GENERAL
For millions, 2016 was a year of unrelenting
misery and fear, as governments and armed
groups abused human rights in a multitude
of ways. Large parts of Syria’s most populous
city, Aleppo, were pounded to dust by air
strikes and street battles, while the cruel
onslaught against civilians in Yemen
continued. From the worsening plight of the
Rohingya people in Myanmar to mass
unlawful killings in South Sudan, from the
vicious crackdowns on dissenting voices in
Turkey and Bahrain to the rise of hate speech
across large parts of Europe and the USA,
the world in 2016 became a darker and more
unstable place.
Meanwhile, the gap between imperative
and action, and between rhetoric and reality,
was stark and at times staggering. Nowhere
was this better illustrated than in the failure of
states attending September’s UN summit for
refugees and migrants to agree any adequate
response to the global refugee crisis which
assumed still greater magnitude and urgency
during the year. While world leaders failed to
rise to the challenge, 75,000 refugees
remained trapped in a desert no man’s land
between Syria and Jordan. 2016 was also the
African Union’s Year of Human Rights; yet
three African Union member states
announced that they were pulling out of the
International Criminal Court, undermining the
prospect of accountability for crimes under
international law. Meanwhile, Sudan’s
President Omar al-Bashir roamed the
continent freely and with impunity while his
government dropped chemical weapons on
its own people in Darfur.
On the political stage, perhaps the most
prominent of many seismic events was the
election of Donald Trump as President of the
USA. His election followed a campaign
during which he frequently made deeply
divisive statements marked by misogyny and
xenophobia, and pledged to roll back
established civil liberties and introduce
policies which would be profoundly inimical
to human rights.
Donald Trump’s poisonous campaign
rhetoric exemplifies a global trend towards
angrier and more divisive politics. Across the
world, leaders and politicians wagered their
future power on narratives of fear and
disunity, pinning blame on the “other” for the
real or manufactured grievances of the
electorate.
His predecessor, President Barack
Obama, leaves a legacy that includes many
grievous failures to uphold human rights, not
least the expansion of the CIA’s secretive
campaign of drone strikes and the
development of a gargantuan mass
surveillance machine as revealed by
whistleblower Edward Snowden. Yet the early
indications from President-Elect Trump
suggest a foreign policy that will significantly
undermine multilateral co-operation and
usher in a new era of greater instability and
mutual suspicion.
Any overarching narrative seeking to
explain the turbulent events of the past year
is likely to be found wanting. But the reality is
that we begin 2017 in a deeply unstable
world full of trepidation and uncertainty about
the future.
Against this background, the surety of the
values articulated in the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights is in danger of
dissolution. The Declaration, penned in the
12 Amnesty International Report 2016/17