Donald Trump‘s public admiration for strongman leaders and breaking of “taboos against racism and xenophobia” have encouraged oppression around the world, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has claimed.

In its annual report on the state of human rights around the world, the group said growing intolerance in states like the US represented “an enormous threat” to minority groups in those countries.

Its executive director, Kenneth Roth, struck out at the US President who he said “displays a disturbing fondness for rights-trampling strongmen”.

He cited Russian President Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte, of the Philippines, as examples, saying: “This makes it much more difficult to stigmatise these authoritarian leaders when Trump says these are great guys.”

Mr Roth added in a post accompanying HRW’s 2018 world report that in the past year, ”Secretary of State Rex Tillerson largely rejected the promotion of human rights as an element of US foreign policy while more broadly reducing the role of the US abroad by presiding over an unprecedented dismantling of the State Department.”

“He refused to fill many senior posts, dismissed several veteran diplomats, slashed the budget, and let the department drift. Many career diplomats and mid-level officials resigned in despair,” he added.

The report urges democratic governments to address the problems that allowed populism to prosper in 2017, such as income inequality, fears of terrorism and growing migration.

HRW hailed Emmanuel Macron’s victory in France’s elections as a “turning point”, saying he had “openly embraced democratic principles” on his way to defeating the far-right Marine Le Pen.

In the US, HRW’s report said, “civic groups, journalists, lawyers, judges, many members of the public, and sometimes even elected members of Trump’s own party” had reacted against what it called the President’s “regressive” outlook.

With Mr Trump in office in the US and the UK “preoccupied” by Brexit, Mr Roth said, “two traditional if flawed defenders of human rights globally are often missing in action”.

The White House has been contacted for comment.

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But the Trump administration has made a number of interventions in support of human rights.

A new round of sanctions on Iranian individuals and entities specifically cited abuses there, and Mr Trump tweeted in support of anti-government protesters who he said had “little food, big inflation and no human rights”.

The head of Iran’s judiciary, Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, was “responsible for ordering, controlling, or otherwise directing, the commission of serious human rights abuses against persons in Iran or Iranian citizens or residents”, the US Treasury said.

And when Cambodia’s leader Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander, dissolved the country’s main opposition party, the White House said it would take “concrete steps” to exert pressure on his government.

“It is becoming increasingly evident to the world that the Cambodian government’s restrictions on civil society, suppression of the press, and banning of more than 100 opposition leaders from political activities have significantly set back Cambodia’s democratic development and placed its economic growth and international standing at risk”, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in November.

HRW also criticised the “hesitancy” of the EU to intervene in specific cases of rights abuse.

It said: “President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan decimated Turkey’s democratic system as the EU focused largely instead on enlisting his help to stem the flight of refugees to Europe and security cooperation.