Commentaries by AmirAli Maleki | JURIST Deputy Managing Editor for Global Commentary

The mountain was colder than she had expected. She had imagined it many times before, but always through him: through the photographs he had brought home, the fragments of routes he described, the names he gave to rocks and ridges, and the particular change that came over his face when he spoke about climbing. He [...]

Scrolling on my phone, I happened upon a video so violent that it seemed to cross the threshold at which ordinary language begins to fail. In it, a man was seen walking down a street in Ahvaz carrying the severed head of a young woman. She was Mona Heydari, 17, killed in 2022 by the [...]

I was born into a family where law was not merely a profession; it was the ordinary language of everyday life. Around our dinner table, conversations rarely drifted far from litigation. Someone was always recounting a difficult case, a stubborn judge, an ingenious defense, an unexpected verdict, or a client whose fate had become inseparable [...]

I remember that when I was a child, a platform had been built on a barren piece of land for executions. On nights when fog passed beside it, I would look at it with fear. I was afraid of it, yet I stared at it from a distance until we had passed it. Sometimes I [...]

The subway doors open, and a dense stream of people begins to pour out of the train. For a brief moment, every face appears strangely familiar, not because they are identical, but because the movement of the crowd, the architecture of the station, and the limitations imposed by the narrow platform dissolve individual differences into [...]

When the dead of a war are sorted into political categories before they are mourned, something more basic than compassion is lost: the condition that makes legal judgment possible at all. I heard that loss in a Telegram voice message from a friend, recorded as the ongoing conflict reached Iran’s southern provinces and people around [...]

A few weeks ago, while standing in a crowded Tehran metro station, I found myself facing a public display commemorating children reportedly killed in an airstrike on a school in Minab. The station continued to function around me with mechanical indifference: announcements repeating, passengers moving, bodies circulating through space as if nothing had been interrupted. [...]

A hot afternoon, a stifling café, the hum of talk around us. A companion nodded toward a woman nearby and asked me: “Who comes to a café wearing skin-tight leggings and carrying an aggressively feminine fake Gucci bag? It doesn’t match, does it, Malek? There’s something aesthetically incoherent about the whole composition—something excessive, almost irritating: [...]

You are reading the words of a criminal. Yes—I am a criminal. Why? Because in order to connect to the free global internet, I violated the law of my own country. I purchased a VPN, crossed the digital borders imposed upon me, and entered a world my government had declared forbidden. In the eyes of [...]

I once said it almost as a joke, but already with a seriousness I did not yet understand: “Be careful, I will kill you and say you were mahdūr al-dam (a person placed outside legal protection of life through judicial determination).” At that moment the phrase sounded like an excess of language, a fragment of [...]