Why Lawyers Are Under Attack Around the World
Published May 8 in TIME, this essay surveys a global wave of state-sponsored attacks on lawyers, framing them as a deliberate authoritarian tactic to disable democratic checks. It highlights the April 2026 re-arrest of Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh — a Sakharov Prize laureate previously sentenced to 33 years and 148 lashes — and recounts the persecution of Russian opposition lawyers, including Alexei Navalny’s legal team (arrested in 2023 on “extremism” charges) and Vladimir Kara-Murza’s attorney Vadim Prokhorov, forced into exile. The piece argues that authoritarian regimes increasingly attack lawyers because they are the professional class capable of mobilizing legal processes against abuses, and that the international cost of attacking them must be raised. It is a useful synthesis piece for LADD’s international scope.