The United States’ human rights practices are taking a nosedive

Politicians call America the 'home of freedom,' but the latest data tells a different story.

The Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI), founded by human rights scholars, finds that in 2025 the U.S. significantly worsened on eight of nine civil and political rights, including the largest declines ever recorded on two of them.

1. How the data is gathered

Governments rarely admit their own abuses, so scholars and advocates usually measure human rights. Traditional methods rely on public reports from the State Department, Amnesty International, and others, which miss abuses and carry bias.

HRMI instead surveys human rights lawyers and researchers directly, uses statistical models to check the info, and produces more complete metrics. It now covers 62 countries, and the U.S. consistently ranks near the bottom.

2. The U.S. has long performed poorly

From 2001 to 2021, the U.S. never ranked above 81st on physical integrity rights, and it was the worst or second-worst among high-income OECD states almost every year.

Since 2017, among the six high-income OECD countries in HRMI's data, the U.S. has been the worst on both physical integrity and empowerment rights.

3. 2025 brought a sharp decline

In 2025, the U.S. saw major declines on eight rights. The falls for freedom from forced disappearance and religious freedom were the largest HRMI has ever recorded, and the drops on arbitrary arrest and free expression were the second-largest.

Drivers include ICE's incommunicado detention and warrantless arrests, airstrikes in international waters killing over a hundred people, crackdowns on protests and campus speech, threats to TV networks, mail-in voting restrictions, and labeling Islamic groups as terrorists.

In short: the data is clear — U.S. human rights performance is nosediving.