Autor/Autorin
The „Amnesty International Report 2016/2017“ was published on 22 February, documenting the human rights situation in a total of 159 countries. The report shows that more and more governments are moving away from the basic consensus of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and that human rights standards are increasingly being eroded. The world has become more unstable and, according to the foreword to the report, 2016 was a year of persistent misery and unrelenting fear for millions of people.
In at least 22 countries, people were killed for standing up for human rights. War crimes were committed in at least 23 countries. International law was broken in at least 36 countries by sending people seeking protection back to countries where they face the threat of serious human rights violations. The Federal Republic of Germany, which deported 60 people seeking protection from Afghanistan in 2016 – despite the deteriorating security situation – has also been criticised. It is downright cynical that 18 refugees were deported from Munich Airport to Afghanistan on the evening the report was published.
Against the backdrop of these developments, it should be noted that the contradiction between the desire for a (global) society in which everyone can be different without fear in the sense of Adorno and a reality in which human rights are trampled on to an unimaginable extent seems to be intensifying and coming to a head.
In the future, as the Secretary General of the German section of Amnesty said in his statement on the report, it will be important that people around the world stand up for the strengthening of human rights and resolutely defend historical achievements such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The „battle for human rights“ (Bauer) must therefore continue and is far from being won.