Features

NO AUTHORIZATION, NO IMMINENCE, NO PLAN

The Iran Strikes and the Rule of Law

Spruance

by Mohamed Arafa, JURIST

The most striking aspect of the Trump administration’s legal argument for the attack on Iran is that, in practical terms, it simply does not exist. When President Donald Trump announced that the United States was "at war," he claimed the strikes were intended to eliminate "imminent threats from the Iranian regime," yet offered no evidence to support that assertion. The historical incidents he cited—the 1979-1981 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, the 1983 bombing of US Marine barracks in Lebanon, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole—occurred decades ago. Trump even suggested that Iran’s leaders "knew [about] and were probably involved" in these events, while emphasizing that the US had "completely and totally obliterated the regime's nuclear program" last year. Beyond these historical episodes, the administration presented no proof of any current, imminent threat from Iran. Under international law, imminence requires a threat that is instant, overwhelming, and leaves no alternative means of response—a standard plainly not met here. Particularly alarming is the explicit targeting of foreign leaders. The killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei came less than two months after US forces attempted to seize Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, signaling a troubling expansion of precedent for US interventions abroad. Deliberately targeting heads of state is prohibited under international law and the New York Convention, to protect political stability and to avoid escalating conflicts unnecessarily.

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THE LUNAR JURISDICTIONAL TRAP

Why AI and Nuclear Ambitions Are Outpacing Space Law

moon

by Vishal Sharma, JURIST

The recent unveiling of Russia's Selena project, a nuclear power plant slated for the lunar surface by 2035 under the joint Russo-Chinese International Lunar Research Station program, has been hailed as a triumph of engineering. But beneath the proposed cooling towers lies a volatile reality. We are about to place the highest-stakes technologies of the 21st century—autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) and nuclear fission—on a legal foundation that has been frozen since the Cold War.

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BURMA: JUNTA-CONTROLLED ELECTORAL 'SHAM'

pro-democracy

by Nava Thakuria, CounterVortex

Trouble-torn Burma (also known as Myanmar or Brahmadesh) is heading for the first general elections since the military coup of February 2021 that ousted a democratically elected government. The seating of a new parliament will mark the re-opening of the bicameral body which was suspended when the military junta seized power. However, several prominent political parties will be barred from the three-phase polling to start on December 28— including Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), which won the last general elections held in November 2020. The new elections, with only those parties approved by the military junta participating, are rejected by the opposition as a "sham." Results are expected by the end of January.

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WHEN CITIZENSHIP BECOMES CASTE

White Supremacy's Push to Rewrite the Constitution

14th amendment

by Timothy Benston, The Black Eye

Birthright citizenship in the United States was never a bureaucratic detail or an immigration loophole. It was a direct assault on white supremacy's original theory of this nation—that Black presence was permissible only as labor, never as belonging. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment sought to end that theory for good. Their language was meant to close the door on the idea that one's worth could be inherited from whiteness or revoked by power. If you are born here, you are of here. That amendment did not just welcome formerly enslaved Black people into the civic body; it attempted to inoculate the Constitution itself against the return of caste.

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THE PARADOX OF TRUMP'S DRUG WAR

Pardons for the Convicted, Drone Strikes for the Suspected

Operation Southern Spear

by Ingrid Burke Friedman, JURIST

This week, President Donald Trump pardoned a man federal prosecutors described as the architect of a "narco-state" who moved 400 tons of cocaine to United States shores. In September, the US military began killing people on Caribbean vessels based on unproven suspicions they were doing the same thing on a far smaller scale. The strikes have drawn allegations of war crimes; the contradiction has drawn bipartisan scrutiny.

Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández walked out of a federal penitentiary in West Virginia on December 2, after Trump issued him a "full and unconditional" pardon. Hernández had been serving a 45-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2024 of facilitating the importation of more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States over nearly two decades. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time that Hernández had "abused his position as President of Honduras to operate the country as a narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity, and the people of Honduras and the United States were forced to suffer the consequences."

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CHINA'S MEGA-HYDRO SCHEME SPARKS OUTCRY IN INDIA

Yarlung

by Nava Thakuria, CounterVortex

The Chinese state's hydro-electric activities on the Yarlung Tsangpo (or Zangbo) river have long been a source of tension with the downstream countries of India and Bangladesh, which cite a risk of ecological disaster. Now Beijing has started building a colossal dam at the Tsangpo's great bend in southeastern Tibet, close to the border with the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Chinese Premier Li Qiang on July 19 attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the Medog Hydropower Station in Nyingchi, Tibet Autonomous Region, and hailed it as the "project of the century." But the $168 billion hydro-dam, which will be the world's largest when it is completed, is described by Arunachal Pradesh leaders as an "existential threat."

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PKK DISSOLUTION: THE LONG FAREWELL TO VANGUARDISM

Kurdistan

by Blade Runner, Freedom News

The formal announcement of the PKK's dissolution has sparked mixed reactions among Turkey's Kurds and international supporters. However, it has been years in the making and comes as no surprise to long-term observers of the Kurdish movement and readers of Abdullah Öcalan's theory of Democratic Confederalism. The shift had been indicated months earlier and signifies a strategic transformation aligned with a broader vision of autonomy beyond the state, the party, and the armed struggle.

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FREE SYRIANS STAND UP FOR PALESTINE

Damascus

by JURIST Staff

We may not have the infrastructure, but we have the will.

—Banner held at protests across Syria, April 2025

In an unprecedented wave of demonstrations across government-held territory, the Syrian people have taken to the streets not to challenge their own leadership, but to protest Israel’s ongoing human rights atrocities in Gaza and its repeated military strikes on Syrian soil.

This explainer breaks down what’s happening, what’s fueling the anger, and what it signals about a country emerging from decades of internal rule, and why Syrians are rallying around a cause that reaches far beyond their own country's borders.

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