NEW YORK: The world is facing the collapse of the 1948 international order established in the wake of World War II, amid the brutal wars in Gaza and Ukraine, while authoritarian policies continue to spread, Amnesty International has warned.
The report accused the world’s most powerful governments, including China, Russia and the United States, of leading the global disregard for international rules and values enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 1948.
The war in Gaza, which began on October 7, was a “descent into hell”, Secretary-General Agnes Callamard wrote in her preface to the report, where “the ‘never again’ moral and legal lessons [of 1948] were torn into a million pieces”.
Noting that Hamas had committed “horrific crimes” in its assault on communities in southern Israel on October 7, Callamard said Israel’s “campaign of retaliation” had become a “campaign of collective punishment”.
Amnesty said while Israel continued to disregard international human rights law, the US, its foremost ally, and other countries including the United Kingdom and Germany were guilty of “grotesque double standards” given their willingness to back Israeli and US authorities over Gaza while condemning war crimes by Russia in Ukraine.
“Israel’s flagrant disregard for international law is compounded by the failures of its allies to stop the indescribable civilian bloodshed meted out in Gaza. Many of those allies were the very architects of that post-World War Two system of law,” Callamard said. “Alongside Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, the growing number of armed conflicts, and massive human rights violations witnessed, for example, in Sudan, Ethiopia and Myanmar – the global rule-based order is at risk of decimation.”
At least 34,183 Palestinians have been killed and 77,143 injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza over the past six months, while more than 1,100 people were killed and dozens taken captive by Hamas on October 7.
Moscow, a veto-holding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022 in a full-scale invasion, and Amnesty said it continued to breach international law with “deliberate attacks against civilians” and the use of “torture or other ill-treatment against prisoners of war”.
China, another veto-holding member of the UNSC, meanwhile, continued to “shield itself from international scrutiny for the crimes against humanity it continues to commit, including against the Uighur minority” in the far western region of Xinjiang.
The UN first revealed the existence of the network of detention centres in 2018, saying at least 1 million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities were being held there. China later admitted there were camps in the region, but said they were vocational skills training centres necessary to tackle “extremism”.
In October 2022, the UN Human Rights Council voted not to debate the issue even though the UN’s human rights office concluded the scale of the alleged abuses might amount to “crimes against humanity“.
Agencies

  Gaza, Palestine, USA

Agencies