New York, Paris, 18 November 2024. The US election is over, and now the fight against the most audacious authoritarian takeover of institutions in the history of the United States begins. While Trump’s first win was catastrophic for human rights, this second one portends a much darker future. Donald Trump arrives prepared. He is now accompanied by a team of policy makers and a cohort of high-powered ideologues who all have a deep-rooted interest in the dismantling of the US Constitution and decoupling of the US from international human rights law. Nothing less than the secular rule of law itself is threatened in the US.
According to Vince Warren, the Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights: "Trump’s brand of racism, which dehumanises and criminalises Black and Brown people, and promotes the well-worn narrative of White victimisation and fear, is the same one that has consolidated US state power to commit genocide of indigenous people, enslave Africans, put Japanese Americans in concentration camps and exclude immigrants. Ironically, both Trump and marginalised communities see democracy as the enemy of white supremacy, which is why Black and Brown people have been working to give democracy life over the past 235 years, and Trump is working to kill it over the next four."
Trump’s plan is to create an authoritarian exception in the midst of democracy, and then tear it down from the inside, taking hold of its vital organs such as the judiciary and the legislative chambers. In practice, this will mean the incitement of unchecked violence by both state and non-state actors for the purpose of crushing labor movements, dividing communities and families, subjecting migrants and asylum seekers to mass deportation, the suppression of reproductive and sexual rights, attacks on trans and gender nonconforming people, and environmental destruction. This regime of unchecked violence will also extend outside of US borders in the country’s foreign policy, already weakened by the current admnistration’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza.
Faced with this prospect, FIDH and the Center for Constitutional Rights call on the international human rights community to continue standing in solidarity with the immense social and civil rights activist community in the US against the dismantling of our collective human rights. For the next four years the United States will be leading by example down a path of human rights abuse, including the exploitation of land and people for profit amidst an accelerating world-wide climate catastrophe, all the while aligning itself with the most authoritarian and abusive regimes and governments globally.
FIDH, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, its member organisation in the US, and all its organisations in the Americas and across the world, pledge to stand up to the human rights abuses inherent to authoritarianism and fight against impunity wherever the Trump’s administration seeks to further its anti-rights agenda.