Last Sunday was Transgender Remembrance Day, the day the LGBTQ community and its allies mourn trans people lost to violence and vow to erase transphobic hate. In the runup to Sunday, people were talking about how Transgender Remembrance Day was particularly important this year, given the push for anti-trans legislation in many states. Tragically, another [...]
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 [...]
In 2002, when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey, defeating Kemalist hegemony, there was a glimmer of hope in the West for the overwhelmingly Muslim country. However, the experience of Turkey over the past 20 years is one descending into an authoritarian regime with clampdowns [...]
During the Barack Obama presidency, the Justice Department prepared a 16-page unsigned, undated “White Paper” that outlined the administration’s legal reasoning justifying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-targeted killings of terrorism suspects if an informed high-level official decided that the target was a high-ranking al-Qaida figure or affiliate who posed an imminent threat of violent attack against [...]
“Sticks dipped in oil, wire, knitting needles, coat hangers, ball point pens” This is not your ordinary grocery list but the list of items used to induce abortion in a country that has criminalized abortion. People specifically from marginalized communities resorted to consumption of turpentine, bleach and detergent solutions and used the above listed objects [...]
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturned Roe v. Wade with a 6-3 majority. This judgment raises multiple constitutional law and due process issues. However, this article will not be addressing these issues. The focus of this piece is to analyze and highlight [...]
“Defectors often cause more difficulty than disinterested disbelievers” – Neal Ash Maxwell, American scholar, educator, and religious leader. Recent events in the Indian state of Maharashtra reaffirm the existence of glaring loopholes in a law aimed at bolstering political stability in India. The recent fall of the democratically elected government led by the state’s former [...]
On December 17, 2010, a vegetable vendor in Tunisia set himself ablaze in open defiance of police harassment, igniting the spark for a wave of democratic revolutions that spread like wildfire across the Arab world. In the decade since the revolutions swept the region, Tunisia has stood out as a success story, being the only [...]
Recently the NITI Aayog rolled out a report in an attempt to increase the participation of the booming gig economy in the nation’s economic growth. The report forecasted a three-fold growth in the gig workforce by 2030. While the report did identify the problem of internet access for women, it omitted the problem of cellular [...]
A set of rules issued recently by Indian cyber security authorities threaten to undermine the very privacy benefits VPNs are designed to enhance. Following the passage of the new directives, VPN providers operating in India are legally obligated to keep a host of private user data on file for a period of five years. This [...]
