Search Results for: Arab Spring

On Tuesday, August 11, after 22 years without an execution in Lebanon, the country’s parliament voted to abolish the death penalty, making it the first Arab country to formally scrap capital punishment. The new law replaces death sentences with life imprisonment with hard labor. And what was the only party on record in that country to [...]

A Damascus criminal court sentenced ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia Tuesday after convicting him of murder, torture, arbitrary detention and crimes against humanity. This was the first judgment issued by Syria’s own courts against the head of a government that ruled the country for decades and put down a 2011 uprising [...]

China and Russia on Tuesday vetoed a UN Security Council resolution aimed at allowing the free passage of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz amid the ongoing conflict in the region. Both China and Russia rejected the resolution for similar reasons. Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia claimed that the resolution wrongly pointed at Iranian actions as [...]

At first glance, neither the June 2025 operation against Iran nor the follow-on attacks of late February 2026 carried any real risks of a nuclear conflict. Allegedly, in those large-scale military actions, cooperative efforts by Israel and the United States were launched to prevent Iranian nuclearization. Still, in any future armed conflict against the Islamic [...]

Friction is the difference between war on paper and war as it actually is. —Carl von Clausewitz, On War North Korea is not Venezuela. While US President Donald J. Trump characterized his recent military actions against Venezuela as “an assault like people have not seen since World War II,” that description was exaggeration prima facie. [...]

In addition to its as-yet undetermined consequences for a potential US-Iran nuclear deal, “Operation Midnight Hammer”—the US military operation that involved aerial strikes on three key Iranian nuclear facilities in June—has brought a long-standing legal debate with considerable implications for US foreign policy to the fore: the scope of executive war powers under the US [...]

Edited by Alanah Vargas | JURIST Staff, US Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees everyone the right to freedom of opinion and expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information through any media without interference. This global dispatch, contributed by correspondents around the world, examines key challenges and developments [...]

On Thursday, Amnesty International called upon the new regime in Syria to provide support to people who were detained and subjected to torture in its military prisons. Survivors of Syria’s detention system face severe mental and physical consequences due to the torture they experienced and lack adequate support. Bissan Faikh, a campaigner at Amnesty International, [...]

Refugees International (RI) stated Wednesday that it welcomes US President Donald Trump’s decision to lift US sanctions on Syria, calling it a crucial step toward recovery after years of devastating conflict. Sanctions originally intended to prevent war profiteering backfired, RI noted, hurting civilians by blocking humanitarian aid. Their removal, following interim leader Ahmed al-Sharaa’s rise [...]

Facing recurrent cycles of terror-violence in a “state of nature,” Israel must defend itself in both law and strategy. Though generally unacknowledged, this dual-level defense could prove gainful not just for Israel, but also for other “civilized nations” in world politics. A patently core obligation, it is universal in scope and justice-seeking in objective. Multiple [...]