FOREWORD “2016 saw the idea of human dignity and equality, the very notion of a human family, coming under vigorous and relentless assault from powerful narratives of blame, fear and scapegoating, propagated by those who sought to take or cling on to power at almost any cost.” SALIL SHETTY, SECRETARY GENERAL For millions, 2016 was a year of unrelenting misery and fear, as governments and armed groups abused human rights in a multitude of ways. Large parts of Syria’s most populous city, Aleppo, were pounded to dust by air strikes and street battles, while the cruel onslaught against civilians in Yemen continued. From the worsening plight of the Rohingya people in Myanmar to mass unlawful killings in South Sudan, from the vicious crackdowns on dissenting voices in Turkey and Bahrain to the rise of hate speech across large parts of Europe and the USA, the world in 2016 became a darker and more unstable place. Meanwhile, the gap between imperative and action, and between rhetoric and reality, was stark and at times staggering. Nowhere was this better illustrated than in the failure of states attending September’s UN summit for refugees and migrants to agree any adequate response to the global refugee crisis which assumed still greater magnitude and urgency during the year. While world leaders failed to rise to the challenge, 75,000 refugees remained trapped in a desert no man’s land between Syria and Jordan. 2016 was also the 12 African Union’s Year of Human Rights; yet three African Union member states announced that they were pulling out of the International Criminal Court, undermining the prospect of accountability for crimes under international law. Meanwhile, Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir roamed the continent freely and with impunity while his government dropped chemical weapons on its own people in Darfur. On the political stage, perhaps the most prominent of many seismic events was the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA. His election followed a campaign during which he frequently made deeply divisive statements marked by misogyny and xenophobia, and pledged to roll back established civil liberties and introduce policies which would be profoundly inimical to human rights. Donald Trump’s poisonous campaign rhetoric exemplifies a global trend towards angrier and more divisive politics. Across the world, leaders and politicians wagered their future power on narratives of fear and disunity, pinning blame on the “other” for the real or manufactured grievances of the electorate. His predecessor, President Barack Obama, leaves a legacy that includes many grievous failures to uphold human rights, not least the expansion of the CIA’s secretive campaign of drone strikes and the development of a gargantuan mass surveillance machine as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Yet the early indications from President-Elect Trump suggest a foreign policy that will significantly undermine multilateral co-operation and usher in a new era of greater instability and mutual suspicion. Any overarching narrative seeking to explain the turbulent events of the past year is likely to be found wanting. But the reality is that we begin 2017 in a deeply unstable world full of trepidation and uncertainty about the future. Against this background, the surety of the values articulated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is in danger of Amnesty International Report 2016/17