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amnesty international
Davos: Meaningful dialogue requires a collective stand against military, economic and diplomatic bullying
Jan 15, 2026
Ahead of attending the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, which begins on 19 January, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, said:
“The ‘spirit of dialogue’, the theme for this year’s meeting in Davos, has been painfully and increasingly absent from international affairs of late. President Trump’s first year back in office has seen the United States withdraw from multilateral bodies, bully other states and relentlessly attack the principles and institutions that underpin the international justice system. At the same time, the likes of Russia and Israel have continued to make a mockery of the Geneva and Genocide Conventions without facing meaningful accountability.
“A few powerful states are unashamedly working to demolish the rules-based order and reshape the world along self-serving lines. Unilateral interventions and corporate interests are taking precedence over long-term strategic partnerships grounded in universal values and collective solutions. This was evident in the Trump administration’s military action in Venezuela and its stated intent to ‘run’ the country, which the president himself admitted was at least partially driven by the interests of US oil corporations. Make no mistake: the only certain consequence of vandalizing international law and multilateral institutions will be extensive suffering and destruction the world over.
“When faced with diplomatic, economic and military bullying and attacks, many states and corporations have opted for appeasement instead of taking a principled and united stand. Humanity needs world leaders, business executives and civil society to collectively resist or even disrupt these destructive trends. It requires denouncing the bullying and the attacks, and strong legal, economic, and diplomatic responses. What should not happen is silence, complicity and inaction. It also demands engaging in a transformative quest for common solutions to the many shared and existential problems we face.
The ‘spirit of dialogue’, the theme for this year’s meeting in Davos, has been painfully and increasingly absent from international affairs of late.
Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard
“We need UN Security Council reform to address abuse of veto powers, robust regulation to protect us against harmful new technologies; more inclusive and transparent decision-making on climate solutions; and international treaties on tax and debt to deliver a more equitable, rights-based global economy. But this will only be achievable through cooperation and steadfast will to resist those who seek to strongarm and divide us.”
Agnès Callamard will be attending the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos throughout its duration from 19 to 23 January. She will be available for media interviews on a range of human rights issues, including:
- Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza
- The USA’s military action in Venezuela, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and the conflicts in Sudan, DRC and Myanmar
- The importance of revindicating and revitalizing multilateralism
- The need for global tax and debt reform and universal social protection
- The urgent need for a full, fast, fair and funded fossil fuel phase-out
- The need to massively scale up climate finance, including to address loss and damage
- Big Tech, corporate accountability and the risks of deregulation
- How to limit the harmful impact of artificial intelligence on human rights, including the right to a healthy environment
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EU: New Rules on Asylum and ‘Safe Countries’ Undermine the Foundation of Refugee Protection
Dec 18, 2025
Reacting to the agreements between the European Parliament and Council on new EU asylum rules, which undermine the very foundation of refugee protection, Olivia Sundberg Diez, the EU Advocate on Migration and Asylum at Amnesty International said:
“This is an unprecedented attack on asylum in the EU, which must be understood in the context of a vast array of punitive deportation measures, still under negotiation. This shameless attempt to sidestep international legal obligations further shifts EU responsibility for refugee protection to countries outside Europe and is far from a humane migration policy that upholds people’s dignity.
“Changes to the ‘safe third country’ concept will mean that people seeking asylum in the EU may see their applications rejected without review, they could be sent to countries to which they have no connection and may have never set foot in before. Today’s agreement marks an abdication from the EU’s commitment to refugee protection and paves the way for EU member states brokering agreements with third countries for the offshore processing of asylum claims.
“Today’s deal also introduces an EU-wide list of countries of origin that are considered ‘safe’, placing a burden on people seeking asylum to prove otherwise. This undermines the individual assessment of protection claims, and raises yet another hurdle in the legal maze that will undoubtedly see people at risk denied the protection they need.”
Background
On December 18, the European Parliament and Council agreed on proposed rules amending the ‘safe third country’ concept in the EU Asylum Procedures Regulation, as well as introducing an EU-wide ‘safe countries of origin’ list.
The rules will make it easier for member states to apply the ‘safe third country’ concept to reject asylum applications as inadmissible, without an examination of their merits, and to forcibly transfer people seeking safety to countries to which they have no connection, or that they may have only transited through. These rules will apply from June 2026, alongside the rest of the Pact on Migration and Asylum.
The new EU-wide list of safe countries of origin includes Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Kosovo, India, Morocco and Tunisia, as well as EU accession candidate countries (with exceptions). Nationals from these countries will be presumed not to be in need of protection and will be channeled through an accelerated asylum procedure, detracting from an individualized assessment of their claims. Provisions expanding the designations of ‘safe countries of origin’ may apply immediately.
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Israel/OPT: UN Report Concluding Israel is Committing Genocide in Gaza Must Spur International Action
Sep 16, 2025
In response to a report submitted by the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, to the 60th session of the UN Human Rights Council today concluding that Israeli authorities and forces have committed and are continuing to commit genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard said:
“As Israeli authorities and forces intensify their brutal campaign of annihilation, particularly in Gaza City, the UN Commission of Inquiry’s damning report provides further confirmation of what Amnesty International and others have been concluding for months: that the Israeli authorities and Israeli forces have committed and are continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
“Building on its previous report, the latest report by the Commission of Inquiry concludes that there is reasonable ground to conclude that Israeli forces and authorities have committed four acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, namely: killing members of the group; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part; and imposing measures intended to prevent births. Crucially, the report also concludes that the Israeli authorities and Israeli forces have had and continue to have the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Statements made by Israeli authorities provide direct evidence for genocidal intent, and the pattern of conduct of Israeli forces provide circumstantial evidence that genocidal intent is the only reasonable inference that could be drawn from the totality of evidence.
“The Commission of Inquiry joins a growing number of international human rights bodies and experts in concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
“There is no more time for excuses: as the evidence of Israel’s genocide continues to mount the international community cannot claim they didn’t know. This report must compel states to take immediate action and fulfill their legal and moral obligation to halt Israel’s genocide. The international community, especially those states with influence on Israel, must exert all possible diplomatic, economic, and political pressure to ensure an immediate and lasting ceasefire and unhindered humanitarian access to Gaza. The findings of this report should compel all states to halt all arms and security transfers to Israel to re-evaluate their trade ties with Israel to ensure they are not contributing to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, apartheid, other crimes against humanity or war crimes, or the unlawful occupation of the OPT.
“With Israel intensifying its brutal campaign of destruction and displacement, especially in Gaza City, including through the mass forced displacement of its residents and the erasure of its millennia-old heritage, the stakes have never been higher. The very existence of Palestinians in Gaza is under threat. The scale of deaths and destruction has already been cataclysmic, but we are at a juncture where states have the tools to prevent further crimes. They must demonstrate that they also have the will to do so.”
“The UN Commission of Inquiry’s report also warns the international community of its serious concerns that the specific intent to destroy the Palestinians as a whole has extended to the rest of the OPT, that is the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Amnesty International urges all states, beginning with those that have supported Israel for the last two years to shift course, to hear the findings of expert after expert, and to do all in their power to protect Palestinians and stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza and prevent its possible spread to the rest of the OPT.”
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Global: Amnesty launches ‘Breaking up with Big Tech’ briefing
Aug 28, 2025
Amnesty International has launched a new briefing titled ‘Breaking up with Big Tech’ calling on governments to rein in the power of Big Tech companies in order to safeguard human rights.
The so-called big five tech companies – Alphabet (Google), Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple – wield extraordinary influence over the infrastructure, services, and norms that shape our online lives. These companies dominate key sectors of the internet: from search engines and social media to app stores and cloud computing. Their largely unchecked power across various digital sectors poses serious risks to the right to privacy, the right to non-discrimination, freedom of opinion and access to information.
The briefing shows how these Big Tech companies have built their power, how they maintain it and how they are now moving to consolidate it further in emerging areas of artificial intelligence.
“Addressing this dominance is critical, not only as a matter of market fairness but as a pressing human rights issue. Breaking up these tech oligarchies will help create an online environment that is fair and just. Failure to address Big Tech dominance can have serious consequences offline, as our investigations into Facebook’s role in the Tigray war in Ethiopia and the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar have shown.”
In many countries, these platforms have become so embedded in daily life that meaningful participation in society now depends on using their services. This gives them enormous power to influence public discourse and control information flows.
Documented cases of content removal, inconsistent moderation practices, and algorithmic biases highlight the dangers of allowing a few companies to dominate the digital public sphere.
Under international human rights law, states have an obligation to respect, protect and fulfil human rights including by regulating and using other measures to keep corporate power in check.
This is the first time Amnesty International has published a briefing of this nature to highlight how states should urgently address the uncontrolled power of these technology companies.
Amnesty International wrote to Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple on 12 August 2025 with a summary of the relevant findings contained in the briefing. Meta and Microsoft responded in writing and their responses are referenced in the briefing. Google, Amazon, and Apple had not responded by the time of publication.
Regulators and civil society groups across the world have made various efforts to try and address this issue. With the publication of this human rights-based approach to competition law and market power, Amnesty is lending its support to those efforts.
States and competition authorities should use competition laws as part of their human rights toolbox. States should investigate and sanction anti-competitive behaviours that harm human rights, prevent regulatory capture, and prevent harmful monopolies from forming.
The briefing recommends among other measures that states must:
- Investigate Big Tech for human rights harm linked to anti-competitive practices.
- Break up companies whose monopoly power is found to harm human rights.
- Investigate the emerging generative AI sector to establish human rights risks and impacts from anticompetitive practices.
- Block mergers and acquisitions that risk harming human rights
- Integrate human rights considerations into anti-competition investigations and decisions
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