Human Rights Watch Portrays US as Major Threat, Citing Trump

Human Rights Watch released its annual report on threats to human rights around the world, and for the first time in the 27 years it has done these surveys, the United States is one of the biggest. The reason: the rise of Donald J. Trump.

Eight days before Trump is to be sworn in as president, the human-rights advocacy group declared that his path to power, in a campaign marked by “misogynistic, xenophobic and racist rhetoric,” could “cause tremendous harm to vulnerable communities, contravene the United States’ core human rights obligations, or both.” This is not the first time Human Rights Watch has cast the United States as a bad actor. After the terrorist attacks in September 2001, it took the administration of President George W. Bush to task for waterboarding and other interrogation techniques widely considered to be torture. But Kenneth Roth, the organization’s executive director, said in an interview: “This is a more fundamental threat to human rights than George Bush after 9/11. I see Trump treating human rights as a constraint on the will of the majority in a way that Bush never did.”