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Tagged: human rights

A crowd of people at a street protest holding rainbow flags and signs.

Issues

When Gender Identity Becomes State Certification

By Bhavya Johari. On March 30, 2026, a day before International Transgender Day of Visibility and five months after India secured its seventh term on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for 2026-2028, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act received Presidential assent. The Amendment replaces self-determination with mandatory certification by medical boards. This potentially invalidates the legal recognition of thousands of individuals who obtained certificates under the self-identification framework. The paradox this exposes is foundational: States can systematically violate norms while occupying positions meant to uphold them.

A group of people sitting in a conference room, listening to a presentation.

Reviews

Are Migrants’ Rights (still) Human Rights? Protection & Exclusion amid the Crisis of Liberalism in the Americas

By Farid Dabour. In February 2026, scholars from Latin America and Europe met at the Latin American Institute of Freie Universität Berlin for the workshop Are Migrants’ Rights (still) Human Rights? Protection & Exclusion amid the Crisis of Liberalism in the Americas, organized by Professor Luisa Feline Freier (FU Berlin) and the Department of Political Science. The conference focused on a timely question: what happens to migrants’ rights when liberal democracies are under pressure, hemispheric orders are shifting, and the authority of human rights institutions is increasingly contested?

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

re:constitution / Rethinking Democracy through Constitutional Adjudication

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.

5in10 / re:constitution

“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.

Comment / EUME

‘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?

Comment / EUME

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.

Comment / EUME

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.

Academic Freedom / Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin

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.

Histories of Refuge

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.