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Tagged: human rights

The building of the Constitutional Court of Lithuania on a sunny day.

Addressing Value Pluralism: The Lithuanian Constitutional Court Enhances Democracy by Resolving the Deadlock of Civil Unions

By Donatas Murauskas. The issue of civil unions for same-sex couples has long been one of the most contentious and sensitive topics in Lithuanian politics, reflecting deeper societal tensions. This changed on 17th April 2025, when, in a significant development, the Lithuanian Constitutional Court addressed the long-standing issue of legal recognition for same-sex and opposite-sex civil unions. This blog post examines how the Constitutional Court addressed one of the fundamental challenges of deliberative democracy in practice – value pluralism – which had stalled the Parliament for many years.

“I have made some unconventional decisions that brought me many pleasant surprises” – 5in10 with Ezgi Özlü

Ezgi Özlü is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Strasbourg and a re:constitution fellow of 2024/2025. She holds a PhD from the University of Strasbourg, where her research focused on how procedural costs affect the right of individual application before the European Court of Human Rights. Having published in three languages, Ezgi’s research interests encompass issues related to access to justice, including legal aid, procedural costs, admissibility requirements, and reparations. She is also focused on topics surrounding the legal profession, such as legal mobilisation, legal ethics, and litigation funding, as well as broader procedural aspects of international adjudication.

‘Woman, Life, Freedom:’ Decoding the Political Poetics of a Woman-led Revolutionary Movement

By Fatemeh Shams. If people in Iran are finding a voice, what words are they choosing to say? All revolutions have slogans – the collective fight reduced to a handful of memorable, chantable, printable words. But what are the origins of these slogans? And how have they changed over time?

A New Iran Has Been Born — A Global Iran

Interview with Asef Bayat. This interview was published in Persian on Oct. 10 by the Tehran daily Etemaad. Shortly after its publication, the Iranian authorities ordered the newspaper to take the interview down from its website. The interview had already gone viral in Iran and abroad, and several other outlets that had reposted it were likewise forced to unpublish it.

Normalization of Violence Against Women in Iran

By Nassim Mehran. On 14 September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, was detained by Iranian police forces because of an “improper hijab.” Two days later, she was pronounced dead, allegedly due to police brutality. For Iranians living under the fundamentalist state’s oppression of women during the last 43 years, this is not an exceptional incident.

On the Margins of the University: Academics in the Face of Power in post-2016 Turkey

By Alihan Mestci. Culture is a battle that “has not yet been won” – this has been iterated on numerous occasions by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ever since late 2016, the year of the July 15th coup attempt. The state of emergency has given a legal blank check for thousands of dismissals in the civil service as well as for the criminalization and marginalization of dissenting voices from the media and civil society.

Essentialism and the Making of African Refugees

By Rose Jaji. African “refugeeness” in the media, policy, and academia is an essentialist physical image conflating material deprivation and multiple victimhoods. Historically, African refugees were capable of political participation even to the point of building vibrant states in the new lands they fled to in precolonial Africa.

Alternative Knowledge Production and Transmission in Turkey: Solidarity Academies (II)

By Noémi Lévy-Aksu. Since the mid-2010s, the authoritarian turn of the Turkish regime has resulted in multiple violations of human rights and freedoms. Universities have been particularly affected by the process, with mass dismissals of academics, repeated attacks on academic freedom and autonomy, and repression of students’ initiatives and protests.

Alternative Knowledge Production and Transmission in Turkey: Solidarity Academies (I)

By Noémi Lévy-Aksu. Since the mid-2010s, the authoritarian turn of the Turkish regime has resulted in multiple violations of human rights and freedoms. Universities have been particularly affected by the process, with mass dismissals of academics, repeated attacks on academic freedom and autonomy, and repression of students’ initiatives and protests.