The international rules-based order is not merely eroding; it is being actively, ruthlessly dismantled. It is totally incorrect to think that the international rules-based order is simply eroding – it is, in fact, being actively, ruthlessly dismantled. Amnesty International’s distressing 2025/26 Annual Report explains that the world finds itself at a very dangerous crossroads. Assessing 144 countries, the human rights watchdog no longer warns of an impending breakdown, it documents a collapse already underway, engineered by a “predatory, anti-rights world order” prioritizing hegemony, profit, and absolute impunity.
Main players in the orchestration of this chaos without laws are the most potent global entities who have dropped diplomacy in favor of blatant violence. The facts and figures revealed in the report form an unforgiving criticism of world leadership. In the Middle East, even with a ceasefire agreement signed in October 2025, Israel capability has not only continued a genocide and apartheid system in Gaza but also very actively pushed forward the illegal annexations of the West Bank. The conflict’s metastasization is staggering. By early 2026, unlawful U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran, including a horrific U.S. strike on an Iranian school that slaughtered over 100 children, ignited retaliatory attacks across the Gulf and escalated Israeli bombardments of Lebanon.
Yet, the United States’ disregard for international law extends far beyond the Middle East The report reveals that the U.S. carried out over 150 extrajudicial executions by bombing vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific, and this was followed by an unprovoked act of aggression against Venezuela in January 2026. Meanwhile, Russia is exploiting this situation of no one holding them accountable by persistently bombing civilian infrastructures in Ukraine.
In Myanmar, the army used motorized paragliders to randomly bomb with explosives civilian villages. Proxy wars are the order of the day in Africa: The UAE has been supplying the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan with advanced Chinese weapons, which culminated in the capture of El Fasher by these forces on October 2025 and the killing of a large number of civilians. At the same time, the M23 rebels supported by Rwanda took several large cities in DR Congo and carried out the torture and execution of civilians.
Amnesty’s Secretary General, Agns Callamard, rightly points to those who enable this massacre: a European Union and Western allies who are devoid of moral and who have resorted to a ‘politics of appeasement.’ Instead of implementing international law, the Trump administration put sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) staff, whereas Russian courts have made arrest warrants available for ICC officials. Ironically, Italy and Hungary refused to arrest persons subject to ICC warrants, with France, Germany, and Poland suggesting that they would do the same.
Within the country, the fight against dissent has been transformed into a war by severely harsh legal and technological means. The U.S. took a step further in their surveillance of people by using AI to identify and deport foreign students who protested for Palestine. The UK authorities, on the other hand, used counterterrorism laws against the Palestine Action network and arrested more than 2,700 peaceful dissidents – something the UK High Court declared illegal in February 2026. Big corporations are also intimidating free speech so much that a U.S. court, in an unprecedented decision, has ordered Greenpeace to pay $345 million to a fossil fuel company. Iran, on its part, has resorted to executing the most deadly massacre of protesters in decades in January 2026, and the Taliban has almost completely removed Afghan women from public life. On a global scale, the major powers such as the U.S. UK, and Germany have drastically reduced budgets for life-saving international aid while simultaneously increasing their military spending to very high levels. However, amidst this grim assessment of global justice, there is a resilient resistance that is coming together.
In 2025, the Gen Z-led protests amazed everyone by their scale and spirit from Kenya to Indonesia. Hungarians, ignoring authoritarian bans, marched through their capital city for LGBTI rights in the number of 300,000. European dockworkers in unison made their voices heard by preventing the loading of weapons shipments to Israel while the Philippines made a very brave human rights statement by handing over the former President Rodrigo Duterte to the ICC.
Humanity’s future is staked out on the battle lines. As Callamard points out, the multilateral system is not dying because it is inefficient, but because it refuses to serve authoritarian hegemony. The real issue today is whether civil society can turn this systemic collapse into a reckoning before the authors of this predatory order destroy the earth beyond repair.