Surviving an execution does not cancel a death sentence. A 1947 Supreme Court ruling allowed a second attempt, and today’s Eighth Amendment standards are demanding. Tennessee failed on September 30 to carry out what would have been its first execution of a woman in more than 200 years. Christa Pike survived what her lawyers describe [...]

Peace negotiations are often driven by an urgent imperative: stop the violence. But when those accused of war crimes remain indispensable to reaching an agreement, efforts to secure peace can collide with demands for accountability. That tension has become increasingly visible as governments, private mediators, and other diplomatic actors seek negotiated solutions to conflicts while [...]

Few atrocities have been documented as extensively as the Srebrenica genocide. Yet three decades later, denial remains politically entrenched, while the evidentiary record painstakingly assembled by international courts faces an uncertain future. JURIST’s Sarisha Harikrishna spoke with Iva Vukušić, Assistant Professor in International History at Utrecht University and Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of [...]

In the aftermath of the recent military escalation involving Iran and the United States, questions concerning the future of international law, humanitarian norms, and the credibility of the post-World War II legal order have once again moved to the center of global debate. At a time when governments, legal scholars, and international organizations continue to [...]

JURIST Contributor Pitasanna Shanmugathas, in a previously unpublished interview, speaks with Law Professor Emeritus Steve Kanter, a distinguished American legal scholar, two-time Fulbright professor of law, and former Dean of Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and Clark College, with a career spanning constitutional law, criminal procedure, and international legal advising across China, Greece, Thailand, [...]

International criminal law has no crime that squarely covers the deliberate, large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure—a gap a recent white paper proposes to close by recognizing ‘Mass Destruction’ as a new crime against humanity. Its author, Professor David M. Crane, is the founding Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone and an internationally [...]

When the internet went dark and the world outside narrowed to the walls of a single room, AmirAli Maleki kept writing. With reliable connectivity gone, the notes application on his phone became his means of defiance. Whenever everyday life pressed in on him, whether through a conversation or an image evoking fear or solidarity, he [...]

Ghana’s Supreme Court on April 29 unanimously upheld a five-year voting ban for people convicted of electoral offenses, ruling that Parliament may restrict the constitutional right to vote beyond the limits written into the Constitution, 1992. The decision in Fred Akweter v. Attorney General & Electoral Commission rejected a challenge by Akweter, a Ghanaian lawyer, [...]

No amount of money can pay for slavery and colonialism—and offering it, Kwesi Pratt Jnr. argues, is itself an insult. That was the premise the Ghanaian journalist and Pan-Africanist—widely known as “Comrade Kwesi Pratt”—brought to the University of Cape Coast’s Faculty of Law this month in a public lecture on reparations for the transatlantic slave [...]

Marwan Barghouti has spent more than two decades behind bars. Born in 1959 in the West Bank village of Kobar, Barghouti rose from student activist to a leading figure in Palestinian political life—a vocal proponent of the two-state solution, he was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 1996 and known for his ability to [...]