Unceasing attacks came from governments, including the most powerful, as well as from the private sector and non-state groups, pushing agendas in opposition to human rights. Many of these assaults are amped up by technology, with the methods and means becoming ever cheaper and ever more accessible to the masses.

An annual analysis from the Dublin-based international rights group Frontline Defenders paints a devastating picture of killings, arbitrary detention, surveillance, and harassment. CIVICUS, an organization that measures civic space (defined as “the respect in policy, law and practice for freedoms of association, expression and peaceful assembly and the extent to which states protect these fundamental rights”), documented declines in 15 countries and improvements in only three. The location and nature of the drops were diverse, taking place from mature democracies such as the United States, Germany, France, and Switzerland, to authoritarian regimes such as Burundi and Oman, and including countries in crisis and conflict such as Sudan and Israel. Some types of human rights were uniquely politicized and singled out in 2025, including women’s rights and environmental rights. Freedom House recorded the 19th straight year of declines in global freedom.

All this is compounded by an unprecedented slash-and-burn to international aid budgets for organizations and individuals working on human rights worldwide. The Human Rights Funders Network of almost 450 institutions across 70 countries estimates that by 2026, human rights funding globally will experience a $1.9 billion reduction compared to levels in 2023.

Taken together, this makes the world more dangerous than ever for human rights defenders and they have fewer resources at their disposal to combat the threats.

In 2026 and moving forward, two crucial questions arise for the defense of human rights globally. First, who will do the work of fighting to protect and advance human rights in the year ahead, and second, how can those in the international community still fiercely committed to human rights support them? These questions will be shadowed by another trend: impunity. Yet, at the same time, lessons and a few positive developments from 2025 can guide human rights defenders on how to seize opportunities in the coming year, beginning even this month at the United Nations.

The Earthquakes of 2025

Eviscerating Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Assistance

In the United States, 2025 began with the newly inaugurated Trump administration dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and canceling approximately 85 percent of its programming (from a budget of more than $35 billion in the fiscal year ending in September 2024). The gutting eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars of support for those working to protect human rights and expand freedom and democracy around the world. The State Department’s grantmaking efforts were similarly cut, with more than half of its awards canceled, including programs directly supporting human rights defenders such as one initiative providing emergency financial assistance to civil society organizations and a fund to promote human rights and democracy and respond to related crises.

Most other major donor countries followed suit, though not with the same sweep or to nearly the same degree. Canada said it would reduce foreign aid by $2.7 billion over the next four years, the Dutch announced structural spending cuts of € 2.4 billion on development aid starting in 2027, and the European Union announced a €2 billion reduction in its main mechanism for development aid for 2025-2027. Multilateral funders were not immune to the trend: the United Nations, for one, will see major budget and staffing cuts for human rights in 2026.

The U.S. retreat from foreign assistance rapidly impacted all development sectors, from health, to education, to humanitarian assistance, but no sector was targeted with such enmity as that of democracy, human rights, and governance. Advocates and implementers saw not only the dire resource clawbacks discussed above, but also found themselves tarred by a steady diet of derisive commentary from the very policymakers doing the cutting.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who, once championed human rights and democracy “activists” as a U.S. Senator, even serving on the board of the democracy-promoting International Republican Institute before the administration eliminated the congressional funding that supported it. He once told a crowd at the Brookings Institution “[f]oreign aid is a very cost-effective way, not only to export our values and our example, but to advance our security and our economic interests.”

But as secretary of state, he abruptly reversed course, writing last April that the State Department unit overseeing civilian security, human rights, and democracy had “a bloated budget and unclear mandate,” and that its “Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor had become a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against `anti-woke’ leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary.” Other members of the administration were similarly sharp-tongued about the sector, with now-former USAID Administrator Pete Marocco conflating the promotion of “civic society” with “regime change” in official court documents and President Donald Trump himself referring to USAID’s leadership as “radical lunatics.”

The rhetoric mirrors similar language used by authoritarians across the globe who have long been opposed to foreign assistance for democracy, human rights, and governance work, and it has real-world consequences for those advocating for human rights and freedom. Leaders of multiple countries have seized on the words of the Trump administration to launch spurious investigations of human rights defenders and other civil society activists who had received U.S. funding.

Closing Civic Space and New Technology

Closing civic space is not a new threat to human rights defenders, but it is one that has reached a fevered pitch in the last few years. This has included both an increase in traditional attacks and a greater reliance on new tactics for suppression, especially in the digital sphere.

Nearly 45 percent of all civic space violations CIVICUS recorded for its annual analysis were related to the freedom of expression. The organization documented more than 900 violations of the right to peaceful assembly and more than 800 violations of freedom of association. The most frequent examples were detentions of protesters and journalists, followed by the detention of human rights defenders outside the context of a protest or journalism, merely for doing their work.

Authoritarian regimes also have become ever more adept at utilizing the digital space for repression. Tactics such as doxing, censorship, smearing, and online harassment are important tools in an authoritarian approach. They have been supplemented in recent years by less evident tactics such as shadow-banning, which the CIVICUS analysis defined as when “a platform restricts content visibility without notifying the user,” allowing the platform to maintain an appearance that it is neutral.

Women rights defenders face additional risks online, including technology-facilitated gender-based violence: In a global survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, 38 percent of women reported personal experience with violence online, from hacking and stalking to image-based sexual abuse.

Attacks in the digital space often are also connected with or fuel physical attacks, “including killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention and harassment,” as Frontline Defenders reported in its analysis. Tunisia is paradigmatic. Amnesty International reported that, beginning in 2024, a “wave of arrests followed a large-scale online campaign…which saw homophobic and transphobic hate speech and discriminatory rhetoric against LGBTI activists and organizations spreading across hundreds of social media pages, including those espousing support for the Tunisian President Kais Said. Traditional media outlets also broadcast inflammatory messages by popular TV and radio hosts attacking LGBTI organizations, calling for their dissolution and for the arrests of LGBTI activists.” 

What to Expect for Human Rights in 2026 

The absence of meaningful and unified international pushback to human rights abuses by some of the world’s most powerful nations means the rights-based international system will continue to face unprecedented attacks, and the challenges that rights defenders face in the year ahead are likely to increase in number and intensity. Authoritarians worldwide have monitored the assault against human rights in the past year — from genocide in Gaza to the crackdowns on protesters in Tanzania to restrictions on freedom of association and expression in El Salvador and so many more instances — and they have learned that they are unlikely to be held accountable internationally in the near term.

Yet despite these challenges, a few developments in 2025 offer some reasons for optimism in the year ahead. Several large-scale, youth-led movements in 2025 held their governments accountable for rights violations, from the July Revolution in Bangladesh that ousted an abusive prime minister to the Gen Z protests in Kenya over economic conditions and government corruption, a protest moniker that spread to other countries as well.

Some governments passed rights-protecting laws, from Thailand’s legalization of same-sex marriage to Colombia’s laws preventing child marriage. Courts stood up for human rights and held perpetrators to account, from the International Criminal Court’s conviction of Sudan’s Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman for war crimes and crimes against humanity to the U.S. conviction of The Gambia’s Michael Saang Correa for torture, to the symbolic judgment of the People’s Tribunal for Women of Afghanistan. These trends are likely to continue in 2026, despite the challenges, because courageous human rights defenders are using every avenue to fight for rights.

This year will also bring targeted opportunities to continue the fight for human rights. A preparatory committee for a proposed international crimes against humanity treaty begins work this month at the United Nations. Also at the U.N., this year’s Universal Periodic Reviews, a regular peer review of countries’ human rights records, will focus on some of the world’s worst rights offenders — including Sudan, Eswatini, and Rwanda — as well as countries with highly mixed records. These reviews provide an opportunity for the world to examine, publicly and critically, the rights records of all 193 countries and for victims and activists to share their stories and insights. While the United States has not submitted its self-evaluation due late last year, the process continued with the usual submissions from the U.N. and others.

Creative activists also are likely to use prominent events, such as the 2026 Olympic Games, to push for the expansion and recognition of human rights. They can take the opportunity of the United States’ 250th anniversary celebrations to highlight and internationalize the country’s founding principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as the requirement that all governments “[derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Who Will Lead the Fight for Human Rights in 2026? 

As many governments pull back and even attack human rights, the work of human rights defenders and organizations will become more critical than ever. Some of them have been leading the fight for decades, including leading international NGOs, national organizations, networks, and prominent individual leaders. Others have done critical human rights work but haven’t labeled themselves as rights defenders, such as organizations providing access to clean water, supporting girls’ education, or working to prevent violent conflict.

Many work at the community level, alongside neighbors and friends, with human rights defenders networks around the world, from the Mozambique Human Rights Defenders Network to Somos Defensores in Colombia. Some are in exile, fighting for rights in their home countries and for refugee and diaspora communities, like the brave Afghan women who organized a landmark People’s Tribunal in 2025 to expose rights violations against women. Others are professionals whose skills directly relate to human rights — lawyers, judges, journalists, and more. They include people like the brave journalists who continue to report on the context in Gaza, despite the incredible risks, and the Burmese lawyers who continue to document rights violations. Some are individual activists, using their platforms and skills to protect rights and call attention to attacks against them, like Iranian Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi who was recently detained alongside other rights defenders while attending a memorial service for a human rights lawyer. Some are informal coalitions, student and youth groups, or protest participants — social movements have been and will be an essential component of the fight for human rights. All of these actors play a critical role in the human rights ecosystem. All of them are human rights defenders.

Aid funding cuts have devastated civil society organizations and will continue to impact human rights advocates. A survey by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems and International IDEA of 125 civil society organizations based in 42 countries found that 84 percent of respondents had lost funding due to U.S. and other countries’ aid cuts, with the same number expecting further cuts in 2026. UN Women reported that more than one in three women’s rights and civil society organizations have suspended or shut down programs to end violence against women and girls and more than 40 percent have scaled back or closed life-saving services. The philanthropic organization Humanity United found that 44 percent of peacebuilding organizations that it surveyed would run out of funds by the end of 2025.

These cuts will only be amplified as time goes on, as fewer young people can become human rights professionals while managing to put food on the table, as legal cases that take years to process aren’t filed for lack of funding, as human rights abuses aren’t documented, as the attacks from authoritarian regimes go unchecked. Shrinking development budgets will no longer provide similar levels of support to courts and anti-corruption bodies that human rights defenders have traditionally approached to pursue justice or for support hotlines where ordinary people can call in anonymously to report abuses at the hands of security forces. Such foreign assistance enabled vital avenues of accountability, but also signified solidarity, that at least some political decisionmakers both at home and abroad believed in human rights and supported those working to deepen and protect them.

But despite the myriad challenges, there will be human rights defenders who continue to fight the fight. For many, changes in funding or the withdrawal of political top-cover won’t stop them from finding avenues. One need only look at Iran’s protests today, where thousands of people are exercising and demanding their human rights amidst a brutal crackdown, internet blackout, and without international funding. Rights defenders have been doing a lot with a little for many years. Some — especially women, youth, Indigenous people, and disabled defenders — have often been excluded from human rights funding and support in the past. A new generation has seen the horrors of Gaza, El-Fasher, eastern Ukraine, or even around the corner from their home, in the news and online, and they have committed themselves to social justice and the prevention of atrocities.

Human rights has always been a universal endeavor which has required diverse supporters, advocates, and allies – this is true now more than ever.

How Can the International Community Support? 

Even those governments and institutions that continue to lead in supporting human rights internationally will need to do more with less, as the above-outlined cuts exemplify, to support those on the front lines. This is the chance to shift “localization” – the practice of funding local civil society organizations directly and based on their priorities, rather than via large overhead-requiring NGOs funded by donor countries — from an ideal to a necessary strategy. A grant of $20,000 may not keep a major international organization online, but it can fund a community-based service provider. Donors can integrate a rights-based approach across portfolios instead of siloing the issue, integrating human rights goals and strategies into other foreign policy initiatives. For example, companies can integrate human rights efforts and measurements into their supply chains for products from batteries to chocolate, producing products they would already produce but in a way that advances human rights as well. Military operations can add human rights and gender considerations with little cost but potentially huge impact. This requires training, tools, and high-level political will to succeed. And they can continue to advocate for rights and use diplomatic pressure and support as key tools.

The elephant in the room is the United States. The Trump administration not only is backtracking on the traditional U.S. commitment and values of democracy and human rights internally and internationally but also has sought to hamper others in funding such initiatives. But there are still important steps that can be taken to protect human rights. Congress must do its job and provide oversight, holding the administration accountable to the laws that protect this important work. Members should speak out against injustices and rights violations, at home and abroad. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), for example, has played a key role in the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, calling out rights abuses in places like Turkey, and Rep. Tim Kennedy (D-NY) led a congressional letter to the Department of Homeland Security urging the Trump administration to overturn its decision to terminate Temporary Protective Status for Burmese people.  State governments have always played a key role in advancing rights, and this will become more critical than ever.

Foreign governments that have engaged on human rights issues but haven’t been the largest international donors or advocates will be particularly important. Some of them are stepping up already. Examples include Japan playing a leading role in advancing women’s issues, South Africa and Gambia taking cases to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel and Myanmar, respectively, of violating the Genocide Convention, and Ireland continuing its steadfast allyship with human rights defenders.

Now is the time for committed countries around the world to continue to demonstrate the global nature of this agenda, set out more than 75 years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and reinvigorated by 18 international human rights treaties.

Philanthropy and the international private sector will be more essential than ever in 2026.  Foundations cannot offset the huge funding gaps left by governments and multilateral donors — total U.S. philanthropic giving is about $6 billion per year, whereas U.S. overseas development assistance alone in 2023 accounted for $223 billion — but they can provide strategic investments that help protect rights and those defending them, amplify their voices, fund innovative new approaches, and help the ecosystem survive. Philanthropies around the world provided nearly $5 billion in human rights support globally in 2020 alone, and their funding is critical for many organizations.

Companies have their own role to play, one that includes but goes well beyond corporate social responsibility, from responsible tech and AI to eliminating forced labor from supply chains to hiring diverse employees. The private sector has a unique opportunity to ensure that human rights remain on the global agenda, because there is a strong business case in favor of human rights protections and alliances with those who truly understand the needs and wants of local populations. A great example is the effort by numerous auto and electronics companies to move away from cobalt batteries, both a recognition of the horrible rights violations facing individuals and communities around cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a recognition that this move is also better for business due to supply chain volatility.

Defending against challenges to human rights, democracy, and good governance in 2026 and beyond will require creativity and broad coalition-building across sectors that too often are siloed, such as health, peacebuilding, humanitarian assistance, and the field of democracy, human rights, and governance. Everyone who does not traditionally think of themselves as a human rights defender, from government officials to the private sector, will need to step up to support those on the frontlines of the fight to defend human rights.

The post Who Will Stand Up for Human Rights in 2026 – and How? appeared first on Just Security.

Thousands ran to the airport without a plan — just fear. Amazingly, what they found there, amid the chaos, was that groups from across Afghanistan, the United States, and the world were working together to evacuate at-risk Afghans in a matter of days. Our organization, Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace, and Security, was among those helping evacuate women who faced threats to their lives because of their work to advance women’s rights.

At great personal peril, Afghans left their belongings, their homes, and their loved ones behind. Leaving was the difference between life and death. That is the reason thousands were granted temporary protected status (TPS) in the United States in the first place. More than 8,200 Afghans were covered by the protection last year. TPS is a humanitarian immigration status granted by the U.S. government to people coming from the most at-risk countries, where conditions such as war or other extraordinary crises make it unsafe or impossible to return. Afghans were granted TPS because the United States recognized how dire and dangerous the situation had become in Afghanistan under Taliban control and the incredible risks faced by those with affiliations with Americans and democratic values. These Afghans stood with America and American values, and America ultimately stood by them in their moment of peril.

Until now.

In April, news emerged that the Trump administration planned to end the TPS designation for Afghanistan. On May 12, the Department of Homeland Security issued the formal announcement that the program would expire on May 20 and that TPS status for Afghans living in the United States would be terminated as on July 14. That could lead to the deportation of Afghans currently living in the country. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s justification for this action: “Afghanistan has had an improved security situation, and its stabilizing economy no longer prevents them from returning to their home country.”

The facts do not support this statement.

We received this news just days after convening more than 20 Afghan women refugees who fled the country after the Taliban takeover and now reside in the United States. Every single one of them spoke of the horrors facing their sisters, friends, loved ones, and communities who remain in Afghanistan. Every one of them spoke about the brutality of the Taliban, the insecurity, the lack of the most basic needs like food and health services, and the lack of economic opportunity. These women leaders in the United States know what all Afghans know: the situation in the country is less secure and less stable than ever.

‘Improved Security’ vs. Reality

Let’s look at the facts.

Noem cites an “improved security situation” in Afghanistan. But the U.S. State Department describes travel to Afghanistan at the highest risk: “do not travel, due to armed conflict, civil unrest, crime, terrorism, and kidnapping. Travel to all areas of Afghanistan is unsafe.” Terrorist groups continue to pose threats in Afghanistan, specifically the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISIS-K). Al-Qaeda also continues to have a presence in Afghanistan.

Killings and disappearances happen far too often in Afghanistan. A 2023 report by the Oslo, Norway-based Human Rights Research League documented more than 400 revenge killings of individuals with links to the United States or the former Afghan government, across all 34 provinces. The victims were government workers, civil society members, human rights defenders — people just like those who fled to the United States in Operation Allies Refuge and Operation Allies Welcome, which the Department of Homeland Security touted at the time. A 2023 report by the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan confirmed that more than 200 former Afghan government officials and security personnel had been extrajudicially killed. These documented cases likely represent just a small fraction of the killings taking place today in Afghanistan. Additionally, censorship has become tighter, and threats against any perceived dissent have remained swift and harsh.

The situation for Afghan women and girls under the Taliban is the worst in the world. The Taliban have been engaged in a draconian assault on women’s rights, determined to erase women and girls from public life. They have issued dozens of edicts, codified under so-called “morality law,” forbidding women to show their faces in public and silencing their voices, even to recite the Quran. Education is prohibited for girls over 12 and strict punishments are inflicted on those attending secret home schools. This has impacted more than 2.2 million Afghan girls who can no longer get a full education. Women are not allowed to work in public. Maternal mortality rates remain very high, yet women have been banned from training to be midwives. Drivers cannot transport women without a male guardian. In a recent proclamation, buildings are not to have windows through which it is possible to see areas in the home used by women. These rules strive to make women invisible. One third of Afghan girls are in forced marriages. Domestic violence has increased.

Meanwhile, religious police are empowered to arrest, detain, disappear, and kill women arbitrarily. Suicide rates among women and girls are on the rise since the Taliban took power. This systematic oppression is nothing less than gender apartheid. Recent reports detail underage girls being sold by their families for food and girls and women who self-immolated rather than being forced into marriage with Taliban soldiers. The situation is so egregious that in a landmark decision on Oct. 4, 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Afghan women are presumed to face persecution under the Taliban regime solely based on their gender and nationality, thereby qualifying them for refugee status without the need for individual assessments.

Humanitarian Crises and Human Rights Abuses

Noem also points to Afghanistan’s “stabilizing economy” as a justification for ending TPS. However, conditions in Afghanistan are so dire that it is still considered to be one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world. Almost two-thirds of the population requires assistance to survive, and 3 million people are dangerously close to famine. About 1.84 million Afghans are left without critical medical care. The crisis has been exacerbated by severe cuts in U.S. humanitarian assistance. Moreover, Afghanistan is impacted by prolonged droughts, water scarcity, and rising temperatures, which are intensifying the humanitarian crisis: livelihoods are being destroyed, agricultural yields are smaller, food insecurity is increasing, health risks are growing, and displacement is intensifying. The economy is precarious, and poverty pervasive.

​​Finally, Noem asserted in the May 12 announcement that some recipients of temporary protected status have been “under investigation for fraud and threatening our public safety and national security.” The statement offered no evidence. Certainly such issues would be a reason to investigate and hold those individuals accountable, but individual cases should not be used as collective punishment against the vast majority of law-abiding Afghans in the United States by scrapping the entire TPS designation.

Contrary to what the Department of Homeland Security claims, the situation in Afghanistan has not improved. In fact, under Taliban rule, the country has become one of the world’s worst human rights abusers, creating incredible risk for all Afghans – no matter their gender — and especially anyone perceived as supporting America.

If TPS is fully terminated on July 14, thousands of Afghan allies will be left out in the cold. Some won’t qualify for other forms of legal protections, such as special immigrant visas (SIVs) or asylum status – because of the criteria for these protections. Others may be deported before they can complete the slow and challenging legal process of attaining longer-term protections.

Deporting allies isn’t only an unjustified bureaucratic decision. It is a betrayal. It should be reversed and TPS should be extended, before more Afghans suffer and die at the hands of the Taliban.

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