Human Rights

International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda addressing the court, The Hague, December 2019

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

Migrants being returned to Mexico by United States Border Patrol officers under the Migration Protection Protocols, or Remain in Mexico program, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, July 2019

Madeleine Schwartz

Inside the Deportation Courts

There is no principle of innocent until proven guilty in immigration court.

October 10, 2019 issue

Benjamin Nathans

Rewriting Human Rights

December 5, 2019 issue

Frank Viviano

Atrocities America Forgot

June 6, 2019 issue

Refugees from Gambia, Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Nigeria rescued by the Italian navy from a rubber boat in the sea between Italy and Libya, October 2014; photograph by Lynsey Addario from her book Of Love & War, published by Penguin

David Cole

Have Human Rights Failed?

April 18, 2019 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

Photographs of Chileans who were executed under Pinochet’s military dictatorship, at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, which opened in 2010

Ariel Dorfman

Chile: Now More Than Ever

August 16, 2018 issue

The Latest

Residents of Ganei Tikvah, near Tel Aviv, Israel, 1982

Ruth Margalit

Women Not at Home

Ronit Matalon’s Israeli novels follow immigrant families much like her own.

November 5, 2020 issue

A migrant child looking through the US-Mexico border fence, Tijuana, November 2018

Francisco Cantú

The Lie of American Asylum

Three new books offer searing portraits of the people affected by family separations and the criminalization of asylum in the Trump era.

November 5, 2020 issue

Gulag historian Yuri Dmitriev following his first trial, in which charges of child pornography were dismissed, Petrozavodsk, Russia, April 5, 2018

Olivier Rolin

Dmitriev: Historian of Stalin’s Gulag

Yuri found his vocation as a researcher—in archives, but also on the ground, in the NKVD killing fields of Karelia. “I wanted to find out about the fate of those people,” Dmitriev told me.

October 7, 2020

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

From top left, Tomiekia Johnson and her daughter, Central California Women’s Facility, Chowchilla, 2013; Joe Vanderford, Shakopee Prison, Minnesota, 2018; Nikki Addimando and her children, Rhinebeck, New York, 2017

Justine van der Leun

Confinement and Contagion

How coronavirus has made those in women’s prisons more vulnerable

October 8, 2020 issue

Hari Kunzru

The Wages of Whiteness

Whiteness is a concept that can be made to serve many interests and positions, not all of them compatible.

September 24, 2020 issue

Jerry Mitchell, Lincoln Square, New York City, February 20, 2020

Claudia Dreifus

An Interview with Jerry Mitchell

Among the murder cases that Jerry Mitchell investigated and got reopened were the 1963 assassination of Mississippi NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, and the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers.

August 24, 2020

John Lewis speaking at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) event in Greenwood, Mississippi, 1963

Danny Lyon

My Friend John Lewis

When, in the summer of 1962, I first saw him sitting in the corner of a small church in Cairo, Illinois, I knew who he was. John Lewis was a Freedom Rider.

August 21, 2020

An image formed from the names of Uyghur writers, intellectuals, and artists in China’s internment camps and prisons, made by the Uyghur art collective Sulu.Artco

Joshua L. Freeman

Uighur Poets of Exile

It is precisely because of poetry’s power in Uighur culture that these three poets, along with nearly every other prominent Uighur intellectual, disappeared more than two years ago into China’s internment camps.

August 13, 2020

Amandla Baraka: We Keep Us Safe, June 2020

Darryl Pinckney

‘We Must Act Out Our Freedom’

If a person cannot imagine a future, then we would say that that person is depressed. But if a country cannot envision a future, how do we describe its condition?

August 20, 2020 issue