Human Rights

As American as Family Separation

Though the cruelties of the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy were unique, they were part of a long American tradition of taking children from their parents.

July 1, 2021 issue

Workers from a Koch Foods plant being taken away by ICE agents during a raid, Morton, Mississippi, August 7, 2019

Julia Preston

Deportation Nation

The deportation system held sway over immigrant communities long before Trump became president, but under his direction it has become even more far-reaching, arbitrary, and cruel.

October 8, 2020 issue

Nathan Whitlock

Where Health Care Is a Human Right

How does the single-payer system work in Canada, and does it need reform?

November 19, 2020 issue

Madeleine Schwartz

Criminalizing a Constitutional Right

For many Americans, Roe v. Wade might as well have been overturned already.

December 3, 2020 issue

David Luban

America the Unaccountable

The Trump administration has declared war on the International Criminal Court—the world’s only permanent court whose mandate is to pursue cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

August 20, 2020 issue

Police officers at the scene of a shooting on the North Side of Chicago, 2009

Peter C. Baker

A Legacy of Torture in Chicago

Laurence Ralph’s ‘The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence’

July 2, 2020 issue

Uighur detainees listening to a “deradicalization” presentation at a reeducation camp, in a photo posted to the Xinjiang Judicial Administration’s WeChat account, Hotan Prefecture, Xinjiang, 2017

James Millward

‘Reeducating’ Xinjiang’s Muslims

A vast new gulag of “de-extremification training centers” has been created for Turkic Muslim inhabitants of Xinjiang

February 7, 2019 issue

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi

The Revival of Church Sanctuary

How a long-abandoned practice became a way for undocumented immigrants to seek protection.

November 19, 2020 issue

The Latest

David S. Reynolds

He Was No Moses

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

December 16, 2021 issue

Raja Shehadeh

What Does Israel Fear from This ‘Terrorist’?

The Israeli government smears human rights organizations—like Al Haq, the one I founded—rather than attempting to end the violations they bring to light.

December 2, 2021 issue

Sarah A. Seo

Reimagining the Public Defender

For the poor, who are disproportionately people of color, the criminal justice system in the United States is essentially a plea-and-probation system.

December 2, 2021 issue

Tareq Baconi

What Apartheid Means for Israel

A growing consensus has formed around the term—not as a rhetorical comparison to South Africa, but describing a system of domination built on the partition of Palestine.

November 5, 2021

Sarah Lustbader

Making Room for Forgiveness

Even if victims or their families decide to forgive, the law rarely does.

November 18, 2021 issue

Nicholas Guyatt

Partners in Brutality

New books investigate the brutality of the internal slave trade by focusing on a single firm, Franklin and Armfield, and examine the role of white women in enslaving Black people.

November 18, 2021 issue

Raja Shehadeh

In His Father’s Footsteps

“So I continued to visit Jaffa, but I had to rely more on my imagination because the reality was of an entirely different place from what he had described.”

October 16, 2021

David Cole

Let the Decision Stand

Every argument against Roe was squarely rejected in the Supreme Court’s 1992 Casey decision, and nothing has changed since then except the composition of the Court.

November 4, 2021 issue

Raja Shehadeh

Jaffa Revisited

The lost world of my parents’ life in the city once known as “the bride of the sea” mirrors the dispossession that has been story of Palestine from 1948 to this day.

October 1, 2021