International rights bodies often betray their evaluation bias in global terms. For instance, Amnesty International recently voiced concerns regarding a constitutional amendment in Pakistan. While the watchdog was seemingly unhappy over domestic developments in Pakistan, it continued to remain conspicuously silent on a lot of real-world transgressions by some of the powerful states. This surely raised some serious and unavoidable questions about the credibility, consistency and impartiality of international human rights advocacy platforms.

In this context, it is impossible to overlook repeated public assertions and policy postures adopted by United States President Donald Trump, who, on record, dismissed the relevance of international law and multilateral constraints, openly asserting the prerogative of unilateral military action wherever it was deemed expedient by Washington.

Such rhetoric, emanating from the highest executive office of a global super-power, constitutes not merely political bravado, but a direct affront to the post-1945 international legal order premised upon sovereignty, non-intervention and collective security.

Equally alarming are the coercive policies and covert operations historically justified under the pretexts of counter-narcotics and human-trafficking enforcement, particularly in Venezuela, a state that also happens to possess the world’s largest proven oil reserves. The pattern is familiar: criminalisation of political adversaries, economic strangulation through sanctions, and the weaponisation of legal narratives to legitimise regime-change ambitions. The dissonance between stated humanitarian objectives and underlying geostrategic and economic interests is neither subtle nor accidental.

More recently, escalating unrest in Iran has been accompanied by overt warnings from Washington, cautioning the Iranian state against internal law-enforcement measures under threat of ‘severe consequences’. Such pronouncements amount to external interference in domestic jurisdiction and further erode the fragile norm of sovereign equality among states.

The fundamental question, therefore, is: why do international watchdogs repeatedly appear disproportionately vigilant when addressing all weaker or post-colonial states, while exercising conspicuous restraint when confronted with systemic violations, belligerent rhetoric, and unilateralism by dominant powers?

When laws and regulations are applied selectively, they cease to be laws and regulations, and become instruments of power. If international human rights institutions aspire to retain moral authority and normative legitimacy, they must demonstrate principled consistency, not expedient selectivity. Otherwise, the global order risks regressing to a Hobbesian reality where legality is subordinated to capability, and where might is right.

Zain Ul Abidin

Kohat