Trump ‘Demonising’ Policy A Global Threat – Amnesty
Agency Report
The US President Donald Trump and other leaders whose policies “demonise” entire groups of people pose a growing danger for the world, Amnesty International said Wednesday in its annual report.
“The poisonous politics of demonisation” are making the world “more fragmented, more unequal (and) more unsafe”, Amnesty chief Salil Shetty said while presenting the 2016 report in Paris.
The report says that “divisive fear-mongering has become a dangerous force in world affairs,” adding: “More and more politicians calling themselves anti-establishment are wielding a toxic agenda that hounds, scapegoats and dehumanises entire groups of people.”
Shetty pointed to Trump, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as leaders employing “us versus them” rhetoric.
Their brand of identity politics is causing a “global pushback” of human rights and undermining a coordinated response to mass atrocities, Amnesty said in the report, which evaluates the state of human rights in 159 countries.
“We have reached a point where there is no longer any red line. Almost no action has become too appalling or indefensible,” Shetty said. “In this new reality it’s easy to imagine a dystopian future where unrestrained brutality becomes a new normal.”
He said that last year the world “ceased to be shocked by the deliberate bombing of hospitals and schools in conflict zones.”
But while acknowledging “the parallels that many are drawing between the present time and 1930s Europe,” Shetty said “We must not be fatalistic.”
He called on “leaders, but especially people, to stand up against the politics of demonisation”.
