Il World Report 2026: i diritti umani nel mondo

Translated by Federica Conti

The World Report 2026, an annual magazine published by the NGO Human Rights Watch, which reached its 13th edition, in its 529 pages, provides a detailed analysis carried out in more than one hundred states regarding related to the human rights conditions. The Executive Director, Philip Bolopion, wrote the introductory essay of the report, entitled “Will Human Rights Survive a Trumpian World? Authoritarian Advances Threaten Rules-Based Order.” The evocative title anticipates the content of the magazine and identifies a new key representative of the new global order and in the field of human rights: Donald Trump.

The democratic recession

In the introductory essay, Bolopian describes our period as a period of "democratic recession", whose levels fell back to 1985, with 72% of the population living under a democratic government, but there is not direct correspondence with the fruition of democratic rights and freedom. In the report of the NGO Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties), published last year, Italy was already illustrated as an example of such recession, together with Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Slovakia: this recession, in the whole of Europe, began to exarcebated from 2024. This is the result of several factors, realized through reforms of the judiciary sistem, excessive use of special legislative procedures, or limiting journalists' and the mass media's freedom of expression. As reported in Bolopian's report, therefore, our society is living the "third wave" theorized by Huntington, political scientist and author of the democratic waves theory: according to this theory, the periods of democratic expansion, characterized by the increase of the number of democratic countries, are followed by periods of recession, in which we assist to the succession of different authoritarian regimes or a regime grounded in democratic legitimacy.

The United States of America

Even without addressing the role played by the United States at an international level, namely without examining the potential configuration of either a U.S.-dominated unilateral order or a multilateral one, we can nevertheless affirm that the political developments in the United States have effects and repercussions on a global scale: Trump's import tax is the perfect representation of this, but others examples are offered by the legitimacy of the electoral system, the freedom of the justice system, the manipulation of information, migrant's rights, international law, the strumentalization of political power in order to dismantel the universitary system and the violation of democratic limits created to safeguard and protect citizen's human rights. According to the report, the democratic recession we are facing has began a few decades ago, but nowadays it is more fragile, together with the disintegration of the national and international order. Bolopian believes that these trends influenced other countries, indeed even those countries involved in the protection of human rights were weakened by internal illiberal politcal forces, and, today, they are afraid of facing the USA and China.

The "panacea" for illiberal drift?

Bolopian suggests to create an union, a strategic alleance among countries that are not yet overwhelmed by the wave of recession, including States that lack significant structural weight in the international order, yet play an important role within the multilateral system: this alleance could at least offer an alternative system to a system based on illiberal policies and could be based on attractive commercial agreements, incorporating significant workers protections, as well as security agreements, to which countries' adhesion is influenced by factors such as democratic governance and the presence of regulations for the protection of human rights. The goal of the next historical period is summerised by Bolopion as follows: “Breaking the authoritarian wave and standing up for human rights is a generational challenge”.

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