‘Nowhere is safe if you’re a lawyer’


It’s a dubious distinction for a country long rooted in democracy. 

As the world marks the Day of the Endangered Lawyer today, the coalition behind the observance has designated the United States as the focus country for 2026.

Every year, the International Coalition for the Day of the Endangered Lawyer, made up of legal associations, bar associations, and networks of legal defenders, selects a country to concentrate attention on the specific challenges lawyers there face and build awareness of the serious risks they’re confronting simply for doing their job.

In its annual report, released Thursday, the Coalition said this year’s selection is “grounded in serious concern over the documented and escalating pattern of interference with the independence of lawyers, law firms, bar associations, prosecutors, and judges in the United States.” 

These developments raise profound questions regarding compliance with international legal standards governing the role and protection of lawyers, as well as the functioning of the justice system, it noted.

The United States now joins the ranks of dictatorships and autocracies like Belarus, China, Iran and Afghanistan, which have been countries of focus in the past.

“Let that sink in,” Nancy Hollander, an internationally recognized US criminal defence lawyer, said in November at the International Bar Association conference in Toronto. She was part of a panel discussing the assault on independent lawyering around the world. 

“We’re in a terrible situation. We have an authoritarian fascist dictatorship. There’s no getting around it. No one can say that’s not where we are.”

‘A climate of fear’

Since the Trump administration took office in January 2025, it has targeted lawyers and firms it perceives to be opposed to its agenda based on their current or past legal representation, or pro bono work. 

This has involved executive orders naming firms and exerting pressure on them through “compliance arrangements,” raising concerns about coerced alignment and the erosion of professional independence. 

There have also been threats to revoke security clearances and cancel federal contracts, as well as questioning and harassment of lawyers at border crossings and attacks on bar associations. Further, there’s been a chilling effect on legal representation in sensitive areas such as immigration, civil liberties and LGBTI+ rights.

Judicial independence is under attack amid a barrage of politicized criticism of judges, including threats of removal, calls for impeachment, and efforts to delegitimize unfavourable rulings. On top of the creeping executive interference, politicized criticism has led to increased threats of physical violence against judges and their families.

“Taken together, these measures do not constitute isolated incidents. They form a pattern that creates a climate of fear, uncertainty, and anticipatory self-censorship within the legal profession, discouraging lawyers from taking on cases, clients, or arguments that may attract political or administrative retaliation,” the Coalition said in its report.

Members were alarmed by the “sustained and co-ordinated campaign aimed at undermining the independence of the legal profession and the judiciary.”

The Coalition noted that this year’s focus on the United States does not suggest that attacks on lawyers are new or unique there. However, there is a “troubling pattern of political intimidation and institutional destabilization unprecedented in the modern history of the US.” The Coalition said this escalation in pressure demands collective international attention. 

It also underscores the fact that no matter how entrenched the rule of law may be, no jurisdiction is immune to backsliding.

The work of Margaret Satterthwaite, the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, influenced the Coalition’s decision to focus on the United States. An independent monitor of how legal professionals are treated around the world, she’s raised concerns about what’s been happening south of the border. 

“What happened after the second Trump presidency began was that I started to see some emblematic signs of what I would call autocratization,” she told the CBA’s Verdicts & Voices podcast in November.

Hollander, who has represented Chelsea Manning and several Guantanamo Bay detainees, said the Trump administration has turned the Department of Justice into the Department of Retaliation. 

That’s seen scores of government lawyers fired for being a part of prosecutions against Trump over the January 6 attack on the Capitol and other alleged crimes.

“They’re taking the brunt of this,” she said. 

“It’s (now) his personal law firm.” 

Among those targeted in what’s been described as a “campaign of retribution” are Jack Smith, former special counsel and New York attorney general Letitia James. 

“This is only the beginning,” Hollander said, noting many lawyers can no longer even get into public buildings and courtrooms.

“I’ve represented a lot of people who’ve had their clearance taken away.”

What’s unfolding has seen lawyers mobilize south of the border. Hollander pointed to the newly formed Lawyers for the Rule of Law. 

“We are a national network of volunteer attorneys committed to defending democracy and the rule of law—especially when those in power fail to do so,” the group says on its website.

In addition to pro bono representation, members are providing amicus advocacy, holding leaders and public officials accountable for unethical and illegal activities, providing public education, and organizing peaceful protests. 

Beyond borders

Often, it’s not the government in the country where they practice that a lawyer has to worry about. 

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, an Irish barrister specializing in human rights and civil liberties, told the IBA panel that authoritarian regimes seek to silence critics wherever they are in the world through transnational repression. 

Increasingly, the law is used as a systematic tool to shut down the rule of law and freedom of expression through direct, online and remote threats, the cancellation of passports, co-opting other countries to join them, coercion, and physical surveillance. 

She’s been followed around the United Nations, and as a result of her representing jailed Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and media mogul Jimmy Lai, she’s been targeted by China. This has included surveillance, threats on her life, and threats of rape. The latter extended to her children. 

Gallagher said that more lawyers are being killed than journalists in the Philippines for the work they’re doing. And as soon as a lawyer takes on a case against Iran or Saudi Arabia, they’re targeted. 

“It’s an anywhere in the world problem,” she said of the length of a state’s arm.

“Nowhere is safe if you’re a lawyer.” 

Here in Canada, Irwin Cotler knows this all too well. 

The former MP and justice minister has long been an outspoken critic of the regime in Tehran, and started campaigning in 2008 to have the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps listed as a terrorist entity (which didn’t happen until 2024). His work as a human rights advocate and lawyer, representing Iranian dissidents, put him in Iran’s crosshairs. 

“I remember the date exactly, November 14, 2023, because I was flying back from Washington. We landed at Trudeau airport in Montreal, and we received notice from the RCMP as soon as we landed: ‘Don't leave, wait for us at the baggage counter.’”

Officers met him, took him to a room and told him they had evidence of an “imminent and lethal threat” on his life.

From then on, he had 24/7 protection — four armoured cars outside his house at all times and armed RCMP officers with him everywhere he went.

Cotler says the threat wasn’t surprising. He’d had issues with Iran for 20 years at that point, and knew from friends there that the regime characterized him as an enemy of the people. 

In October 2024, he was informed of a plot to assassinate him within 48 hours. He was supposed to attend the 60th anniversary of his McGill law class that evening, and in the morning, the RCMP told him all seemed okay. Later in the day, they told him he couldn’t go. 

“I said I'd really been looking forward to this. And they said, ‘No, we have new information about an imminent threat of assassination on your life within the next 24 to 48 hours. So you can't go.’ And I didn't go.”

In recent months, Cotler’s level of protection has been reduced, as the threat was perceived to not be as great as it had been.

“I laughed,” he said. 

“I told them I’m happy to have it lowered because it was a little cumbersome to have so many people around when there are other people who need protection. But I follow Iran very closely, and it’s the other way around. Iran has been intensifying its transnational repression and assassinations. CSIS came out with a report recently that said exactly that.”

While no longer under 24-hour protection, he still has security accompanying him everywhere he goes. 

So what have the last few years been like, knowing he’s at risk?

“You just factor it in to your lifestyle. You know that if you want to go somewhere, you have to notify the RCMP and give them two hours' notice so they can come pick you up and take you where you need to go. And after a while, you just know that that’s the reality you live with it.”

Cotler said his situation should be seen as a wake-up call. Iran has sleeper cells in Canada, along with a critical mass of repression and targets, including journalists, lawyers, dissidents, and leaders of the diaspora. While Russia and China also engage in transnational repression, he says Iran takes it a step further with assassination.

“The phenomenon of transnational repression and assassination means that we have to take the necessary measures here,” he said. 

“This is a standing threat to our national security, and we have to take it seriously.”

A wide and well-documented trend

Cotler is the international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, one of 13 organizations worldwide that are expressing deep alarm at the growing repression of lawyers for the legitimate exercise of their professional duties.

“Attacks on lawyers strike at the very heart of the rule of law, deny victims meaningful access to justice, and enable wider assaults on human rights and democratic institutions,” the groups said in a statement marking the International Day of the Endangered Lawyer.

From state capture of bar associations, systemic government oppression, politically motivated prosecutions and imprisonment for defending state opponents, reputational smears through propaganda, and forced disappearances, authoritarian regimes are deliberately targeting lawyers. The groups are calling out Russia, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Tanzania, and Turkey, among others, for what’s become a wide and well-documented trend.

“Lawyers are disbarred, disciplined, arbitrarily detained, prosecuted, forced into exile, subjected to surveillance and harassment, and in some cases killed, precisely because they seek to uphold the rights of their clients, including human rights defenders, opposition leaders, journalists, women, minorities, and other marginalized communities,” the statement said. 

“Despite this, lawyers continue to perform a crucial function. Even in countries without an independent and impartial judiciary, where judicial outcomes are largely predetermined, lawyers document abuses, create records of testimonies and verdicts, and preserve evidence that can one day support accountability.”

While justice is never won easily, it cannot be won at all if those who defend it are left defenceless, the group says, which is why it is calling on states to end all forms of persecution, retaliation and harassment against lawyers for their professional activities, and immediately release all lawyers detained or imprisoned for representing clients or peacefully exercising their own rights.

In May 2025, after a decade of work, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe introduced the first international treaty aimed at safeguarding lawyers from threats, harassment, and undue interference in their work. 

The Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of the Profession of Lawyer currently has 25 signatories. 

“It’s the first internationally binding instrument to defend the legal profession,” Thierry Wickers, past president of the CCBE, told the IBA panel in November.

“It’s a recognition of the place and role we play in a democratic society.”

He noted that any country in the world can sign it, and that there is monitoring to ensure it’s correctly applied in countries that have added their names.

Of course, the convention is only effective if governments give it force. That’s why the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and other organizations are calling on countries to sign, ratify, and fully implement it.

“We encourage states in other regions to develop complementary binding standards so that protection of the legal profession becomes a universal norm.” 

After all, as the Coalition makes clear in its report, the independence of the legal profession is not a professional privilege. 

“It is a cornerstone of the rule of law and a prerequisite for access to justice, fair trial guarantees, and the effective protection of human rights. International law is unequivocal on this point.”