On September 16, 2022, Iran’s Basij Resistance Force, a volunteer paramilitary organization that operates under the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, arrested Mahsa Amini for her refusal to comply with the country’s headscarf requirement, an alleged breach of its public morality code. Reports surfaced that the Basij severely beat Amini for resisting an officer’s insults, after which Amini [...]
“No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor.” — T. Roosevelt On August 8, 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) executed a [...]
Since February 24, the war in Ukraine has left at least 15.7 million people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance and protection (UN OCHA). Many humanitarian agencies have scaled up their operations in response to the dramatic humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and its neighboring countries. But in a war that has seen large-scale attacks on [...]
As the Ukrainian military and its citizens defiantly fight back against Russian forces, LGBTQ+ citizens face a unique fight of their own, the fight to safely be themselves. Last month, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations authored a disturbing letter, warning of serious human rights violations if Russia successfully occupies Ukraine. Ambassador Bathsheba Nell [...]
On February 24, 2022, at about 6:00 AM, I woke up to a telephone call from my friend. I was at home in Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine, located near the border with Russia. “The war has started” were the first words I heard that day. I just stayed in the middle of my [...]
It’s been one full year since Myanmar has come once again under military rule. Since the February 1, 2021 coup, the poverty-stricken Southeast Asian nation has attracted international media attention, but for the wrong reasons. The country, with a 60 million population of varied ethnicities, continues to witness public protests against the junta, counter military [...]
The January 6th Capitol attack, while having lasted some eight hours, did not end on the day in question. The effects of this attack have been felt into 2021 and will continue, most likely, for years to come. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has arrested over 700 persons for a variety of crimes, including [...]
“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.” – John F. Kennedy Fukuyama’s “The End of History” paper claimed that the western liberal democracy is the final form of the human-governance evolution. His argument relied on the Democratic Peace Theory, originating from the early 1700s, which states that most democratic [...]
Following the reimposition of US sanctions on Iran on May 8, 2018, a Swedish bandage maker, Mölnlycke, decided to halt shipments to Iran, and this decision has affected patients in Iran who are affected by a severe and life-threatening rare skin condition called Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB). Many patients in Iran, where an estimated 800 to [...]
There has been concerted global lobbying for the abolition of capital punishment. This is evidenced by, among other things, the passage of the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Aiming at the Abolition of the Death Penalty and a similar move being made by other regional entities such as [...]
