FOREWORD “As we enter the year in which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70, it is abundantly clear that none of us can take our human rights for granted.” SALIL SHETTY, SECRETARY GENERAL Throughout 2017, millions across the world experienced the bitter fruits of a rising politics of demonization. Its ultimate consequences were laid bare in the horrific military campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. This caused an exodus of some 655,000 people into neighbouring Bangladesh in a matter of weeks, the fastest-growing refugee crisis of 2017. At the end of the year, their prospects for the future remained very unclear, and the enduring failure of world leaders to provide real solutions for refugees left little reason for optimism. This episode will stand in history as yet another testament to the world’s catastrophic failure to address conditions that provide fertile ground for mass atrocity crimes. The warning signs in Myanmar had long been visible: massive discrimination and segregation had become normalized within a regime that amounted to apartheid, and for long years the Rohingya people were routinely demonized and stripped of the basic conditions needed to live in dignity. The transformation of discrimination and demonization into mass violence is tragically familiar, and its ruinous consequences cannot be easily undone. The appalling injustices meted out to the Rohingya may have been especially visible in 2017, but the trend of leaders and politicians demonizing whole groups of people based on their identity reverberated across the globe. The past year showed us once again what happens when the politics of demonization become mainstream, with grim consequences for human rights. As we enter 2018, the year in which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70, it is abundantly clear that none of us can take any of our human rights for granted. We certainly cannot take for granted that we will be free to gather together in protest or to criticize our governments. Neither can we take for granted that social security will be available when we are old or incapacitated; that our babies can grow up in cities with clean, breathable air; or that as young people we will leave school to find jobs that enable us to buy a home. The battle for human rights is never decisively won in any place or at any point in time. The frontiers shift continually, so there can never be room for complacency. In the history of human rights, this has perhaps never been clearer. Yet, faced with unprecedented challenges across the world, people have shown repeatedly that their thirst for justice, dignity and equality will not be extinguished; they continue to find new and bold ways of expressing this, while often paying a heavy price. In 2017, this global battle of values reached a new level of intensity. Assaults on the basic values underpinning human rights – which recognize the dignity and equality of all people – have assumed vast proportions. Conflicts, fuelled by the international arms trade, continue to exact a cataclysmic toll on civilians, often by design. Whether in the humanitarian catastrophe of Yemen, exacerbated by Saudi Arabia’s blockade, or government and international forces’ indiscriminate killing of civilians used as human shields by the armed group calling itself Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or crimes under international law driving a 12 Amnesty International Report 2017/18