page_title: Dictator
section_title: Human rights abuses
hierarchical_section_title: Dictator / Human rights abuses
caption_attribution_description: English: Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud at the Royal Court Palace in Riyadh.
context_page_description: A dictator is a political leader who possesses absolute power. A dictatorship is a state ruled by one dictator or by a small clique. The word originated as the title of a magistrate in the Roman Republic appointed by the Senate to rule the republic in times of emergency.
  Like the term "tyrant", and to a lesser degree "autocrat", "dictator" came to be used almost exclusively as a non-titular term for oppressive rule. Thus, in modern usage, the term "dictator" is generally used to describe a leader who holds or abuses an extraordinary amount of personal power. Dictatorships are often characterised by some of the following: suspension of elections and civil liberties; proclamation of a state of emergency; rule by decree; repression of political opponents; not abiding by the rule of law procedures, and cult of personality. Dictatorships are often one-party or dominant-party states.
  A wide variety of leaders coming to power in different kinds of regimes, such as military juntas, one-party states, dominant-party states, and civilian governments under a personal rule, have been described as dictators. They may hold left or right-wing views, or may be apolitical.
context_section_description: Over time, dictators have been known to use tactics that violate human rights. For example, under the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, government policy was enforced by extrajudicial killings, secret police and the notorious Gulag system of concentration camps. Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of political prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time. Data collected from Soviet archives gives the death toll from Gulags at 1,053,829. Other human rights abuses by the Soviet state included human experimentation, the use of psychiatry as a political weapon and the denial of freedoms of religion, assembly, speech and association.
  Pol Pot became dictator of Cambodia in 1975. In all, an estimated 1.7 million people (out of a population of 7 million) died due to the policies of his four-year dictatorship. As a result, Pol Pot is sometimes described as "the Hitler of Cambodia" and "a genocidal tyrant".
  The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudan's military dictator Omar al-Bashir over alleged war crimes in Darfur.
caption: Mohammad bin Salman, Crown Prince and de facto dictator of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is said to have used torture against his political enemies at home,[19] whilst the bombing of Yemen under his decree has caused a famine.[20]
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