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

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

Ursula Lindsey

In the Fire

The Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi fearlessly told unpleasant truths about discrimination against women in Arab countries.

October 21, 2021 issue

Diana R. Gordon

Another Immigration Purgatory for Children

Rather than detain unaccompanied minors, the US places tens of thousands with families every year—then virtually abandons them. Detention is not good policy, but neither is neglect.

September 27, 2021

Kenneth Roth

Litigating the War on Terror: An Exchange

The head of Human Rights Watch rejects criticism that efforts to mitigate America’s worst excesses after September 11, 2001 helped sanitize US belligerence.

September 8, 2021

Nancy F. Cott

A Work in Progress

Two new books on the history of feminism emphasize global grassroots efforts and the influence of American women labor leaders on international agreements.

September 23, 2021 issue

Samuel Moyn

Michael Ratner’s Tragedy, and Ours

The career of the veteran constitutional rights litigator offers a case history of how US humanitarians ended up sanitizing the war on terror instead of opposing it.

September 1, 2021

Sayed Kashua

My Palestinian Diaspora

To live under forced exile in the heart of my homeland or to live in voluntary exile as a resident alien—this is my choice. Either way, to be a stranger in a strange land.

August 7, 2021