In Geneva tomorrow UN leaders will sit down to discuss one of the great global crises of our times.

It’s a crisis characterised by among other things, regressive policies, hate-filled rhetoric, unlawful killings and the persecution of minorities.

In looking back over the past year the delegates at the 37th Session of the UN Human Rights Council will no doubt reiterate what almost every major humanitarian organisation has concluded in their own annual reports.

From Washington to Cairo, Manila to Caracas, world leaders are undermining human rights for millions of people across the globe.

“The spectres of hatred and fear now loom large in world affairs, and we have few governments standing up for human rights in these disturbing times,” says Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International, which last week released it’s own excoriating annual summary.

“Instead, leaders such as el-Sisi, Duterte, Maduro, Putin, Trump and Xi [the leaders of Egypt, the Philippines, Venezuela, Russia, America and China respectively] are callously undermining the rights of millions,” Shetty added, as the findings of Amnesty’s ‘The State of the World’s Human Rights’ reverberated throughout the world’s corridors of power.

In what has marked a shocking roll-back of human rights over the last year, leaders have pushed hate, fought against liberty, ignored crimes against humanity and blithely let inequality and suffering spin out of control, says Amnesty.

SYRIA

The damning summary of human rights abuses comes as this weekend, some 400,000 Syrians most of them civilians, remain besieged in the enclave of Eastern Ghouta. Subjected to Sarin nerve gas, barrel bombs, airstrikes, shelling and starvation, many rights groups say that “flagrant war crimes” are being committed on an “epic scale.” Ghouta has been characterised as "hell on earth".

But Syria is far from being the only country in which human rights abuses are being committed on an ever-increasing level.

Last month the 2018 Rule of Law Index reported that fundamental human rights had diminished in almost two thirds of the 113 countries it surveyed. The 2018 index, published by the World Justice Project (WJP), gathers data from more than 110,000 households and 3,000 experts to compare their experiences of legal systems worldwide, by calculating weighted scores across eight separate categories.

These include constraints on government powers, as well as absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, and criminal justice.

Like the Amnesty Report the conclusions drawn by the WJP point to a rolling back from international legal obligations.

“The WJP’s findings provide worrying confirmation that we live in very dangerous times for the rule of law and human rights,” said Murray Hunt, director of the UK-based Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, in response to the index report.

“The worldwide resurgence of populism, authoritarian nationalism and the general retreat from international legal obligations are trends which, if not checked, pose an existential threat to the rule of law,” Hunt said.

AMERICA

Faced with such a repressive tide, human rights activists have identified a number of countries as being global hotspots for major violations over the past year.

Many groups including Amnesty point to the United States government for what they see as setting the tone in fuelling bigotry and persecution across the world. The Trump administration’s polarising decision to institute travel bans from six Muslim-majority countries was what Amnesty called “transparently hateful.”

Only last Thursday, a second federal appeals court found President Donald Trump’s travel ban violated the US Constitution by discriminating on the basis of religion.

“From his effort during his first weeks in office to implement a Muslim travel ban, to his initial response to the violence in Charlottesville, the president's words have been racist and discriminatory,” says Leslie Vinjamuri, an associate fellow with the US and the Americas Programme at the UK-based Chatham House Institute of International Affairs.

“Words matter, they send a clear signal that enables certain kinds of activity and inhibits others,” added Vinjamuri.

Far from the US acting as one of the leaders in upholding human rights, activists instead identified Trump as responsible for stoking the flames of white supremacy and anti-immigrant xenophobia.

The evidence for this according to the US-based civil rights watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Centre, can be seen in the rise of the number of US based hate groups which grew by more than four per cent last year, marking a 20 per cent rise since 2014.

Rights groups point to what they say is Trump’s dog whistling of the far right since coming to office in 2017. Neo-Nazi groups that only the year before had numbered 99, saw the largest increase in the US, growing by 22 per cent and reaching 121 groups across the country.

VENEZUELA

Meanwhile elsewhere in the Americas, another leader, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, was also widely condemned by activists for overseeing one of the worst human rights crisis in his country’s history.

Venezuela’s democratic institutions and human rights situation have undergone “marked deterioration” over the past two years, says The Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC).

It identifies “serious obstacles” to political participation, increased repression and censorship, rising crime and insecurity and intensifying poverty.

Rights groups describe a country at “breaking point,” where 75 per cent of Venezuelans are reportedly suffering from weight loss and the collapse of a currency has caused hyperinflation that is forecast to hit 13,000 per cent this year.

PHILIPPINES

While Venezuela retains its unwanted position at the bottom of the Rule of Law Index, just behind Cambodia and Afghanistan, the Philippines is this year’s biggest faller, dropping 18 places to 88th in the table, on top of a slump of nine places in the 2016 survey.

Under the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, popularly known as “The Punisher” the death toll in his government’s unlawful ‘war on drugs,’ has now reached staggering levels since he came to office in 2016.

“While the country continues to laugh at the lewd jokes of Duterte more than 20,000 of our countrymen have been killed,” said opposition senator Antonio Trillanes.

Trillanes went on to add that it is only in the Philippines that a president “flaunts as an accomplishment the killing of people he despises”.

While the Duterte administration and his police force have maintained all the dead were killed during legitimate police operations, critics like Trillanes say this is far from the case.

“They basically admitted that there are no so-called vigilante killings, that these deaths are actually state-sponsored executions,” he went on to say.

MYANMAR

This past year the epicentre of some of the worst human rights abuses on earth has been in Myanmar in South East Asia. There a government crackdown against the country’s Muslim minority Rohingya population led to more than 655,000 refugees fleeing into neighbouring Bangladesh in the final five months of 2017, according to the UN.

New satellite images of Myanmar's Rakhine state last week show that the Myanmar authorities have been bulldozing Rohingya Muslim villages that were burned down during what the UN called an ethnic cleansing campaign against the minority, the US based, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Friday.

“The authorities want to cover up evidence of the atrocities and take away the land that belongs to the Rohingya. They want to make it difficult to find graves, weapons used or any other evidence that would connect the crime scene to the criminals,” Brad Adams, HRW's Asia director was quoted as saying.

Many believe the evidence gathered so far of atrocities against the Rohingya is only the tip of the iceberg, with the UN suggesting the crisis may amount to genocide. What has unfolded in Myanmar says Amnesty’s Salil Shetty is the ultimate consequence of a society encouraged to hate, scapegoat and fear minorities.

The persecution of the Rohingya with its transformation of discrimination and demonisation into mass violence is tragically familiar, activists insist.

It is also a global failure they argue, given that the warning signs in Myanmar had long been visible with massive discrimination and segregation normalised within a regime that amounted to apartheid.

REST OF THE WORLD

Many human rights activists have flagged up what they call the “politics of demonisation” that have allowed these many and varied global violations to rise. It’s a trend they say began even before Trump took office. It is epitomised by extrajudicial executions in Egypt under President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi. It is evident in Turkey's crackdown on dissent. It can be seen in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trial of anti-corruption protestors on “politically motivated charges,” and in the regime of President Xi Jinping of China where Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo died in custody.

In Europe too there are ominous signs among countries including the UK that saw a gathering storm against refugees, migrants, and religious minorities and the use of counterterrorism measures “disproportionately restricting” rights in the name of security.

In Poland we witnessed threats against the independence of the judiciary. Hungry “reached a new low” automatically detaining asylum seekers, in breach of EU law, while Germany, grappling with an influx of refugees, reported more than 1,000 criminal offences against refugees and asylum seekers.

THE FUTURE

Against this dark portrait of a world in which human rights regressed in 2017, there remain points of light.

Rights groups take encouragement from the fact that because of the regressive approach to human rights adopted by a number of world leaders, new waves of social activism and protest have been inspired and thrown up.

An obvious example would be the Women's March in January last year, which began in the US before becoming a global protest. The #MeToo campaign has also elevated the issue of harassment and discrimination against women into a global phenomenon. In general there is a sense that protest movements are on the rise globally, and certainly their need has rarely been greater.

But even allowing for such positive developments, the overwhelming indicators tell of what Amnesty in its annual report called the “bitter fruit” of deteriorating human rights in 2017 and a future that looks even more challenging

“All signs point to a crisis not just for human rights, but for the human rights movement,” said Professor Samuel Moyn of Yale University.

“Within many nations, these fundamental rights are falling prey to the backlash against a globalising economy in which the rich are winning. But human rights movements have not historically set out to name or shame inequality,” Moyn said in January as 2018 got underway.

As the 37th Session of the UN Human Rights Council prepares to sit tomorrow in Switzerland, it too may find itself the latest multilateral institution on the chopping block with US funding being slashed by the Trump administration.

Should Washington adopt such a cut and run strategy it would seriously undermine the council’s crucial work making it harder to continue.

Most significantly and worse of all, it would be a gift to the very dictators and ‘strongmen’ that have been and continue to be responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in the world today.