Amnesty warns of Trump's 'toxic' and 'demonising' policies

"The poisonous politics of demonisation" are making the world "more fragmented, more unequal (and) more unsafe", Amnesty chief Salil Shetty said while presenting the 408-page report in Paris.

"Divisive fear-mongering has become a dangerous force in world affairs," the report said.

"More and more politicians calling themselves anti-establishment are wielding a toxic agenda that hounds, scapegoats and dehumanises entire groups of people."

Shetty pointed to Trump, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as leaders employing "us versus them" rhetoric.

Their brand of identity politics is causing a "global pushback" of human rights and undermining a coordinated response to mass atrocities, Amnesty said in the report, which evaluates the state of human rights in 159 countries.

"We have reached a point where there is no longer any red line. Almost no action has become too appalling or indefensible," Shetty said.

"In this new reality it's easy to imagine a dystopian future where unrestrained brutality becomes a new normal."

More and more politicians calling themselves anti-establishment are wielding a toxic agenda that hounds, scapegoats and dehumanises entire groups of people - Salil Shetty

He said that last year the world "ceased to be shocked by the deliberate bombing of hospitals and schools in conflict zones".

While acknowledging "the parallels that many are drawing between the present time and 1930s Europe", Shetty said "we must not be fatalistic".

He called on "leaders, but especially people, to stand up against the politics of demonisation".

'Plain stupid'

Shetty denounced the Trump administration's attempted travel ban as inhumane, illegal and "just plain stupid...  because what it's doing is making all of us, not just people in the United States, less safe".

After a federal judge blocked the ban affecting all refugees and anyone from seven Muslim-majority countries, the White House is planning a new order this week that would allow it to circumvent the court.

"So in the country that used to say 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free'... we now have the politics of demonisation at work," Shetty said.

"One of the most dangerous things that happened in 2016 was to increasingly start equating refugees with terrorists, and this is a very systematic change of discourse by (those) who want to create this impression... based on close to zero evidence," he said.