Amnesty International’s latest report on human rights around the globe makes for damning reading for Israel, the US, and the UK. While mainstream media is likely to receive the report with typical Western bias that paints Global South countries as backwards, there’s a reason to compare the standards in three nations that form the bedrock of both historical and modern day colonialism.
Amnesty on Israel
As the prime example of a modern-day settler colonial state, Amnesty’s assessment of human rights in Israel is damning – to say the least. The report writers paint a much more accurate picture than either current administration in the US or UK (including prior conservative and liberal governments) have done thus far. They write:
Israel committed genocide in Gaza, including by causing some of the highest known death tolls among children, journalists, and health and humanitarian workers of any recent con ict in the world, and deliberately in inflicting on Palestinians conditions calculated to bring about their physical destruction.
Charities and organisations have been increasingly likely to call Israel’s actions what they are: genocidal. Amnesty is also careful to point out that Israel’s actions amount to apartheid:
Israel committed the crime of apartheid, including through the forcible transfer and displacement of Palestinians both in Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territory…Thousands of Palestinians were subjected to arbitrary detention and to ill-treatment, amounting to torture in many cases.
What mainstream media routinely ignores in its reporting on Palestine is that Israel is acting with brazen impunity:
The International Court of Justice’s instructions to avert genocide and end illegal occupation were ignored. Freedom of expression and peaceful assembly came under attack.
The organisation documents how Israel has deliberately and purposely damaged infrastructure vital to the continuation of life for Palestinians. In great detail, the report lays out that:
The high civilian death toll was a result of direct, disproportionate, or indiscriminate attack.
A shocking 90% of Gaza’s population have been displaced, with most people displaced multiple times. Amnesty found that:
All humanitarian organizations reported excessive Israeli restrictions and delays on approvals of aid transfers.
The report details the sheer number of journalists and healthcare workers Israel have targeted. It also notes that “more than 10,000 Palestinians” have been subject to “enforced disappearance or incommunicado detention.” Alarmingly, “all” Palestinian detention facilities have seen reports of sexual assault and rape.
Choice of pearl clutching
However, that wasn’t what mainstream media led with when reporting on Amnesty’s findings, if they reported on them at all. The Guardian ran with a headline about Trump leading the charge on repression, whilst the BBC managed a report on a different Amnesty investigation on the death penalty. Whilst the former did include a sentence about Israel’s war crimes, the choices of these mainstream British outlets says a lot about their priorities. They’ll breathlessly run liveblogs on Israeli hostages, but a comprehensive condemnation of Israel’s apartheid doesn’t warrant much attention.
What the Guardian did mention, however, was the following:
Women, girls and LGBTQ+ people faced intensifying attacks in a number of countries including Afghanistan and Iran, while LGBTQ+ rights were targeted in Uganda, Georgia and Bulgaria.
Now, that’s accurate – those countries did target queer people. However, it’s a suspect choice of countries to highlight. Unsurprisingly for any queer people in the UK and the US, Amnesty pulled up both countries on degrading queer rights. However, there’s a colonial narrative that determines which countries are considered to be wholly backwards, and which countries’ degradation of human rights doesn’t even warrant a mention. Those countries can easily be separated into the Global North and the Global South. Or, if that’s too tricky a dulux colour chart on human skin will do the job.
Whilst Trump is undoubtedly to blame for a terrifying rollback of rights, he’s currently been in power for just over a hundred days. And, the rest of Amnesty’s assessment on the US was no less damning.
Additional barriers
Amnesty found that abortion bans “severely impacted” rights. As is often the case, the report found that when it came to reproductive rights:
Additional barriers existed for many people, including Black and other racialized people, Indigenous Peoples, undocumented immigrants, transgender people, rural residents and people living in poverty.
They also found that anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric rocketed as:
Authorities expanded the system of arbitrary mass immigration detention, surveillance and electronic monitoring.
The continued detention of Muslim men at US facility, Guantanamo Bay, was called a “violation of international law.” The US is accused of carrying out extrajudicial killings around the world, and of withholding information from investigations into those killings.
They noted that campus protests against Israeli genocide were met with stiff violence. Black people were disproportionately targeted by police violence:
According to media sources, police shot and killed 1,133 people in 2024. Black people
were disproportionately impacted by the use of lethal force, comprising nearly 22% of deaths from police use of firearms, despite representing 13% of the population.
And:
Discrimination and violence against LGBTI people were widespread and anti-LGBTI legislation persisted.
Transgender people of colour in particular faced horrific violence:
According to the Human Rights Campaign, 84% of transgender people killed were people of colour and 50% were Black transgender women.
Then, in a representation of the contemporary colonial powers sticking together, it is of course the US supplying weapons to Israel that makes up a significant part of their denigration of human rights. Amnesty found that:
US-made bombs and components were identified by Amnesty International in unlawful deadly air strikes by the Israeli military on residential homes and a makeshift camp for displaced people in the occupied Gaza Strip in January, April, and May. The continued supply of munitions to Israel violated US laws and policies regarding the transfer and sale of arms, intended to prevent arms transfers that risk contributing to civilian harm and violations of human rights or international humanitarian law.
Amnesty: highlighting support of genocide
The US has been central to Israel’s genocide in Palestine. But, another nation that has also provided support for the apartheid has been the UK. Amnesty strongly rebuked the UK, citing “irresponsible arms transfers”:
In June, UN special experts called on states to end all transfers of military equipment to Israel to avoid the risk of responsibility for human rights violations. In September, the new government partially suspended export licences, citing a “clear risk” of breaches of international humanitarian law by the Israeli military. However, the UK contribution to the F-35 fighter jet, a crucial element in Israeli military activity, was excluded from this suspension.
On top of that, Amnesty judged the government to have had “a chilling effect” in its crackdown on freedom of speech in relation to peaceful Palestine and environmental protests. They also referred to the race riots of 2024 as further evidence of:
anti-asylum seeker rhetoric from figures in politics and the media.
The report cites the Windrush scandal as something that “confirmed the racism at the heart of government policy” and noted that:
Children from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds were disproportionately impacted by the high level of child poverty…The statistics demonstrated a disproportionate impact on children from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds, of whom 47% were living in poverty, compared with 24% of white children.
Social security allowances were found to be “less than the cost of common essentials for a single person.” On top of that, the report also referenced the UK failing to meet its obligations towards disabled people.
Shithole countries
It’s no coincidence that the unifying factor amongst these three countries is a deep and abiding commitment to Israel’s genocide and apartheid in Palestine. Israel is a central cog in the contemporary colonial manifestations of the UK and US in the modern age. And, it’s no accident that it’s the most marginalised in society – poor people, trans people, disabled people, and those multiply marginalised – who are facing the brunt of a rolling back of rights.
Trump famously referred to Haiti and El Salvador as “shithole countries.” Whilst those countries – like any country on Earth – will have problems with human rights and discrimination, it is undeniable that the litany of heinous impacts detailed above are a result of a colonial military industrial complex that hoards power built on the bones and blood of the colonised. It’s down to capitalist rot which means that such vast inequalities can exist in the UK and US. If the sheer amount of human rights abuses detailed above were describing a Global South country, you can imagine the rush of headlines peddling colonialist garbage. But, because it’s the UK and US propping up Israel, they’ll go unnoticed by mainstream media.
Featured image via the Canary
By Maryam Jameela
This post was originally published on Canary.
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