ICC issues arrest warrants for Taliban leaders over persecution of women and girls
The warrants also accuse the leaders of persecuting 'other persons non-conforming with the Taliban's policy on gender, gender identity or expression; and on political grounds against persons perceived as 'allies of girls and women.''
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The Supreme Court Just Gave Trump a Free Template to Win by Losing
On Friday, the Supreme Court held that federal courts lack authority to issue universal injunctions. The decision in Trump v. CASA deprives the judiciary of a vital tool in checking the most egregious abuses of executive power. But it also does something more pernicious, creating a blueprint for the Trump administration to win by losing. Universal injunctions are an extraordinary and controversial remedy because they cover everyone harmed or threatened by a defendant's conduct, not just the individual plaintiffs. But sometimes extraordinary lawlessness requires an extraordinary remedy. That core truth animates the centuries-old English tradition of equity, which developed as a system to do justice when courts of law weren't up to the task. In the United States, equity has evolved to address ingenious and diabolical attempts by government officials to evade their legal obligations. From the early 20th century through the Civil Rights era and beyond, equity provided new, meaningful relief when the existing legal order came up short. To take just one of many examples, Southern school boards resisting desegregation often forced Black plaintiffs to bring individual lawsuits, but piecemeal litigation barely made a dent in massive resistance until equity stepped in. A new class action device—an equitable innovation—allowed Black families to harness their collective power and sue on behalf of all aggrieved people to realize the promise of Brown v. Board of Education. This past still echoes through the current political moment as the Trump administration invents ever more devious ways to skirt the law. One might think its sheer brazenness, the way it almost relishes violating the law, would lead courts to intervene more aggressively. But often the administration's goal is not to win in court. The point is instead to inflict maximal pain and chaos that courts, especially after CASA, are largely powerless to undo. Consider several examples. The Trump administration has tried to prevent Harvard University from enrolling any international students. A federal judge quickly blocked that effort, calling the administration's arguments 'absurd.' But the loss doesn't really matter. The administration's saber rattling has driven numerous institutions, including Columbia University, to the bargaining table as President Donald Trump has threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. And on the same day that the Supreme Court decided CASA, the Department of Justice succeeded in demanding that the president of the University of Virginia resign. The administration didn't even need to file a lawsuit to make UVA bend to its will. What a court ultimately might have said about the legality of that effort is now irrelevant. Think about federal employees whom the administration illegally fired or threatened to fire. Even if some of them ultimately win in court, the administration will have succeeded in driving many others into retirement or other jobs. The cultivated chaos has proved far more powerful than any adverse judicial decision ever will. Some of the most devastatingly successful efforts made headlines for months as the Trump administration simply ignored certain migrants' due process rights and even federal court orders. Although a handful of wrongfully deported immigrants might be returned to the United States in the hope that their rights and the rule of law can be vindicated, the vast majority will not, no matter what any court says. And perhaps the clearest example of how the Trump administration can win by losing comes from the executive orders that seek to punish disfavored law firms. Every firm that has actually challenged those executive orders has scored a quick legal victory, and, tellingly, the Trump administration has not bothered to appeal those losses. Yet most firms have bent the knee, agreeing to settlements with Trump and collectively agreeing to provide billions of dollars' worth of pro bono legal services to causes he supports. The executive orders' blatant illegality is beside the point. Trump has exacted his pound of flesh, forcing some of the world's most powerful law firms to apologize for crossing him and sending a chilling message to anyone else who would do the same. By rejecting every use of universal injunctions, the Supreme Court in CASA tacitly blessed this lawlessness. Universal injunctions had been a potent weapon against Trump's indifference to the rule of law because they essentially flipped the presumption about who should receive the benefit of the doubt. Normally, when a plaintiff challenges a governmental action as unlawful, the government gets that benefit. It may continue to enforce its policy while the suit plays out, especially as to people who aren't involved with the litigation. But when the government acts in bad faith by disregarding clear legal obligations—rewriting the 14th Amendment, jawboning universities and law firms, ignoring due process—it should lose that presumption. Universal injunctions gave ordinary people the benefit of the existing legal rules. The government could still attempt to justify its actions in court, but it didn't get the time and space to sow chaos and demand submission while court cases dragged on. A couple of months ago, the Supreme Court seemed to recognize that we as a country had found ourselves in uncharted territory. It had gotten wise to the Trump administration's deliberate evasions of court orders as the government tried to deport people with hardly any notice or even a semblance of due process. Over Easter weekend, the court intervened with extraordinary speed to prevent one group of Venezuelan migrants from being rendered to El Salvador. Justice Samuel Alito dissented, arguing that the court's haste ignored all the usual deliberate procedures when, in his view, there was no good reason to do so. It turned out that the majority of seven justices was right to worry that the Trump administration was playing fast and loose with the law. A bus of migrants was already on its way to the airport when the Supreme Court intervened. If the justices had adhered to conventional procedures, the migrants would have been gone, perhaps forever. The majority of the court showed both creativity and courage in the face of lawlessness, at least in this one case. That light has dimmed. A court that seemed alive to these threats has surrendered a powerful tool in upholding the rule of law. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's poignant dissent in CASA captures the point. By eliminating universal injunctions, the court 'has gifted the Executive with the prerogative of sometimes disregarding the law' and 'has put both our legal system, and our system of government, in grave jeopardy.'
Yahoo
24 minutes ago
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ICC issues arrest warrants for Taliban leaders over persecution of women and girls
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants Tuesday for the Taliban's supreme leader and the head of Afghanistan's Supreme Court on charges of persecuting women and girls since seizing power nearly four years ago. The warrants also accuse the leaders of persecuting 'other persons nonconforming with the Taliban's policy on gender, gender identity or expression; and on political grounds against persons perceived as 'allies of girls and women.'' The warrants were issued against Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhunzada and the head of the Supreme Court, Abdul Hakim Haqqani. The court's prosecution office called the decision to issue warrants 'an important vindication and acknowledgment of the rights of Afghan women and girls." It added that the judges' ruling "also recognizes the rights and lived experiences of persons whom the Taliban perceived as not conforming with their ideological expectations of gender identity or expression, such as members of the LGBTQI+ community, and persons whom the Taliban perceived as allies of girls and women.' Zabihullah Mujahid, the chief spokesman for the Taliban government, rejected the court's authority. He said in a statement that the court's decision reflected 'open hostility and hatred toward the holy religion of Islam and Shariah law,' and is 'an insult to the beliefs of all Muslims.' The warrants came just hours after the United Nations adopted a resolution Monday over U.S. objections that called on the Taliban to reverse their worsening oppression of women and girls and eliminate all terrorist organizations. They are the latest high-profile suspects named in arrest warrants issued by The Hague-based court that also has sought the arrest of other leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Since returning to power in Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban have imposed harsh measures, banning women from public places and girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade. Last week, Russia became the first country to formally recognize the Taliban's government. The court said in a statement that the Taliban have 'severely deprived, through decrees and edicts, girls and women of the rights to education, privacy and family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion." The court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, sought the warrants in January, saying that they recognized that 'Afghan women and girls as well as the LGBTQI+ community are facing an unprecedented, unconscionable and ongoing persecution by the Taliban.' Global advocacy group Human Rights Watch welcomed the decision, and urged the international community to help enforce the court's warrants. 'Senior Taliban leaders are now wanted men for their alleged persecution of women, girls, and gender-nonconforming people," Liz Evenson, the group's international justice director, said in a statement. ICC judges approved a request in 2022 from the prosecutor to reopen an investigation into Afghanistan. The probe was shelved after Kabul said it could handle the investigation. Khan said he wanted to reopen the inquiry because under the Taliban, there was 'no longer the prospect of genuine and effective domestic investigations' in Afghanistan. Khan's predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, got approval in 2020 to start looking at offenses allegedly committed by Afghan government forces, the Taliban, American troops and U.S. foreign intelligence operatives dating back to 2002. When Khan reopened the probe, he said he would focus on crimes committed by the Taliban and the Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State group. He said he would 'deprioritize' other aspects of the investigation, such as crimes committed by Americans. The warrants for Taliban leaders were issued while Khan has stepped down temporarily pending the outcome of an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct. Khan has categorically denied accusations that he tried for more than a year to coerce a female aide into a sexual relationship and groped her against her will. ___ Associated Press writer Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed.
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The Supreme Court's Super-Neutral Principle That Applies Only to Democratic Presidents
This week's Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus is a mailbag special in which co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern answer listeners' burning questions about the law under the joint reign of Donald Trump's monarchical presidency and our imperial Supreme Court. Amicus listeners have a lot of smart questions, so we're continuing our occasional 'Dear (Juris)Prudence' series, in which we share your questions, as well as Dahlia's and Mark's answers. Write to amicus@ to pose a question to Dahlia and Mark. The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity. Dear (Juris)Prudence, Can you explain why the major-questions doctrine wasn't invoked when deciding the Trump v. CASA birthright citizenship case but was used in overturning student loan relief under President Joe Biden? Is it because the justices didn't decide the merits of CASA but did decide the merits of student loan relief? And if so, why can the court seemingly then choose to decide procedure rather than merits? —Paul Michael Davis Mark Joseph Stern: I'll start with the procedural question vs. the merits. That is totally at the Supreme Court's discretion. The court could have asked the parties in Trump v. CASA to talk about birthright citizenship and tee up a ruling on Trump's executive order because it obviously violates the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. And it shouldn't have been difficult for the court to say so. But instead, it manipulated the docket, manipulated the case, to make it an attack on the universal injunctions that had been holding this executive order back from being implemented, and ignored the merits altogether. The converse happened in the student loan case. That was really a case about standing, because no one was clearly injured by the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness. The Supreme Court, as Justice Elena Kagan wrote persuasively in her dissent, should have started and ended by saying that nobody had standing in that case. Instead, the court manipulated its standing doctrine to pretend that there was standing by some party, and then the court swiftly reached the merits and invoked the so-called major-questions doctrine, saying that the policy was unlawful. In doing so, Kagan expressly said, the majority violated the Constitution by exceeding its power—a pretty rare charge for a justice to levy at the majority. So that choice—whether to decide a procedural issue or reach for the merits—is all totally discretionary. But we should always pay attention to how the court is tweaking its docket and the questions that it takes up to reach the outcome that it wants to. The first part of your question was about the major-questions doctrine, however. Dahlia and I always put this 'doctrine' in air quotes. It's not a real thing. It's totally malleable. It's total BS, resting on what five or six justices see as a major question, and when they think they've spotted a major question, then they apply super close scrutiny to what the executive branch has tried to do, and will usually strike it down. They did this with the student loan relief program under Biden. They did it with climate regulation under Biden. I doubt that they will do this to anything that Donald Trump tries to enact. I still think it's likely they'll strike down the birthright citizenship order on the merits, though I'm less certain of that than I was a couple of weeks ago. I still think it's more likely than not, but I doubt they'll invoke the major-questions doctrine. I think that that doctrine will lie dormant throughout four years of Trump, and if you had any doubt about that, I'll note that Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence at the end of June in which he strongly implied that the major-questions doctrine wouldn't apply to Trump's tariffs. Remember, one of the grounds that the lower court used to strike down the tariffs was essentially invoking the major-questions doctrine to say that Congress hadn't given Trump this power clearly enough. So it was a major question about a power that Trump couldn't exercise, and here is Kavanaugh, one of the key creators of the doctrine, who wielded it so ferociously under Biden, giving up in advance and strongly suggesting that his pet doctrine just doesn't apply to tariffs, because that's foreign trade and that's beyond the remit of the federal judiciary. This is why I fundamentally object to this doctrine in the first place. It is so malleable that all it really does is help courts pick the outcome that they want to reach, then guide themselves along the way, acting as though they have an actual legal basis for doing so.
