In recent months, more than a dozen American states have sought to restrict or ban drag performances, with many framing these legislative moves as aimed at protecting minors. In this explainer, JURIST unpacks the trend and highlights its worrying implications for free speech. What is drag? Drag is an art form, wherein individuals dressed in [...]
American basketball star Britney Griner was transferred to a Russian penal colony this week to serve out her nine-year sentence for possession of vape cartridges containing cannabis oil. The transfer — which comes nearly nine months after she was detained in a Moscow airport in the days leading up to Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine [...]
Seven months into Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, amid mounting evidence of Russian battlefield losses, Putin announced his country’s latest annexation of four territories. In a rambling speech that alternately sought legitimacy for the annexations in the UN Charter and railed against Western colonialism and transgender rights, the enigmatic Russian leader revealed a great deal about [...]
“This is not a bluff,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said of Moscow’s willingness to deploy nuclear weapons in Ukraine during a meandering speech on Wednesday, in which he also laid the groundwork for Russia’s annexation of several Ukrainian regions, and announced a partial military mobilization. Hours after Putin’s address, US President Joe Biden referred to [...]
Following last week’s discovery of a mass grave containing some 450 bodies in the Ukrainian town of Izium, questions of international criminal culpability loom heavily. “Russia left behind mass graves of hundreds of shot and tortured people in the Izium area. In the 21st century, such attacks against the civilian population are unthinkable and abhorrent. [...]
Before the United States withdrew its forces from Afghanistan last August, Najla Raheel was a busy lawyer specializing in assisting victims of domestic violence. She dedicated her free time to serving on legislative committees to strengthen protections for women’s rights. She also served in the upper echelons of the country’s nascent independent bar association. But [...]
In April 1940, in what would come to be known as the Katyn Massacre, members of the feared Soviet secret police force, the NKVD, began the systematic murders of more than 21,000 Polish prisoners of war. The victims of the massacre — which, in addition to military officers, included many civilians — were buried by [...]
For Oleh Kornat, a lawyer-turned-member of the Ukrainian resistance, a disturbing element of Moscow’s invasion of his country has been its misuse of the term “genocide” to justify it. “Civilians are being targeted. Maternity wards have been attacked. Children with cancer have been displaced. And this has all happened under the guise of Russia’s ostensible [...]
In the days that have passed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many have questioned the implications of this unchecked aggression against a sovereign nation for the post-war international order. Fears have proliferated that international justice is dead, that autocracy has won. But a closer look reveals that this invasion is the product of weakness, not [...]
“Lately, I have been experiencing a strong form of survivors guilt,” said Afghan legal scholar Ahmad Ali Shariati in a recent interview. A recipient of the prestigious Chevening Scholarship, he had just completed his studies for a legal master’s at the University of Aberdeen when the Taliban reclaimed control of Kabul amid the fallout of [...]
