United States President Joe Biden demonstrated “a double standard” on human rights, providing “arms without restriction” to Israel despite its war crimes in Gaza while condemning Russia for “similar violations” in Ukraine, according to a new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.
The rights group’s 2025 world report, published on Thursday, noted how the US withheld funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, amid Gaza’s starvation crisis due to the Israeli siege.
At the same time, the Biden administration provided Israel with an unprecedented $17.9bn in security aid and approved more than 100 arms sales.
The report highlighted the “often-disregarded reality” that liberal democracies such as the US were “not always reliable champions of human rights” at home or abroad.
It added that many of the 70 national elections held last year were deemed to have been driven by “racism, hate, and discrimination”, with polls in the US and in the European Union no exception.
The report raised concerns that US President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on January 20, would “inflict even greater human rights damage” in his second term, “emboldening illiberal leaders worldwide to follow suit”.
It also noted the advance of the far right in European Parliament elections last year, “exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment and nationalist rhetoric to advance policies that threaten minority communities and undermine democratic norms”.
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