The latest annual report on the state of global human rights from Human Rights Watch presents a grim outlook for democracy and LGBTQ+ rights around the world.

Central to that assessment: the Trump administration.

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“The global human rights system is in peril,” writes Philippe Bolopion, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, in the report’s introduction.

“Under relentless pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, and persistently undermined by China and Russia, the rules-based international order is being crushed, threatening to take with it the architecture human rights defenders have come to rely on to advance norms and protect freedoms,” the report states.

The democratic order is facing a “democratic recession,” Bolopion says: “72% of the world’s population now living under autocracy. Russia and China are less free today than 20 years ago. And so is the United States.”

“Authoritarian leaders have exploited public mistrust and anger to win elections and then dismantled the very institutions that brought them to power,” Bolopion writes, citing India, Turkey, and Hungary, among other countries, without naming the U.S.

“Where democracy is undermined, so too are human rights,” he says.

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“The U.S. used to actually be a government that was advancing the rights of LGBT people around the world, and making sure that it was finding its way into resolutions, into U.N. documents,” Bolopion said at a press conference announcing the report. “Now we see the opposite movement.”

Both at home and abroad, the Trump administration and its allies are advancing an agenda that rolls back or eliminates protections for LGBTQ+ people.

“In many parts of the U.S., officials at all levels continue to target the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people,” the report details. “The current administration has escalated attacks on transgender communities. It has taken executive actions that prohibit government use of the term gender, narrowly define sex as that assigned at birth, restrict and withdraw support for gender-affirming care for youth, and roll back protections for transgender students.”

Those domestic attacks accompany slashed international or eliminated funding overseas and at the U.N. that once advanced LGBTQ+ rights and well-being.

The shutdown of USAID ended funding for HIV/AIDS programs and others that benefited LGBTQ+ people. The U.S. has withdrawn from dozens of U.N. treaties and other international agreements on the pretext of eliminating “gender ideology.” In January, it broadened the Mexico City Policy barring promotion of abortion to include “gender ideology,” as well.

“LGBTQ rights are not just a casualty of the Trump foreign policy,” Human Rights Watch Washington Director Sarah Yager said during the press conference. “It is the intent of the Trump foreign policy.”

The exhaustive summary of human rights abuses in other countries includes many enabled by tacit or implied support of autocratic governments by the Trump administration, including those in Hungary and Russia.

“In March, Hungary’s parliament amended the law on freedom of assembly banning Pride marches and other public LGBT events, imposing fines on potential participants, and authorizing the use of facial recognition to identify attendees,” the report notes.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a close personal ally of Trump.

In Russia, where President Vladimir Putin continues to enjoy Trump’s admiration as a “smart” and “strong leader,” multiple laws aimed at erasing the LGBTQ+ community continue to inflict damage.

“In 2025, at least two individuals received prison sentences, of six and three years respectively, for allegedly ‘involving’ people in the ‘international LGBT movement,’ which the Supreme Court had designated as ‘extremist,'” the report details.

“Another person received a compulsory labor sentence for repeated displays of ‘extremist’ symbols, such as the rainbow flag. In September, a court in Tula handed down a two-year suspended sentence for alleged participation in the ‘LGBT movement’ to a local resident over a social media post about the need for people to defend their rights.”

In 2025, Human Rights Watch was labeled “undesirable” by Russia’s government and banned from operating in the country.

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