Day: July 30, 2026

U.S. ALIEN TERRORISM COURT: CONGRESS LEFT OUT TORTURE SAFEGUARD

Congress gave an extraordinary national-security court the power to order removal of adjudicated “alien terrorists” from the country, but left a dangerous gap in the adjudication of claims under the Convention Against Torture, which bars deportation to countries where the removed individual would face serious risk of torture. In a commentary for JURIST, immigration attorney Richard T. Herman breaks down the problems posed by the Alien Terrorist Removal Court under international law—a critical question now that the Trump administration has sent a case to the secretive body for the first time since Congress created it in 1996.

Watching the Shadows

AI chatbots shill for repressive regimes

New research from Meta’s Oversight Board found commercial large language models (LLMs) from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, OpenAI and xAI are far less likely to criticize repressive leaders and governments. The research calls it “free speech infringements by proxy.” Apps and material produced by these generative AI tools could actively reproduce restrictions, including on political criticism. It’s unclear why these AI models are doing this—underscoring the need for companies to be transparent and build “human rights due diligence” into the process, before it’s too late. China, Thailand, Cambodia and Saudi Arabia topped the list of countries with the highest refusal rates when LLMs were prompted to create materials criticizing governments. (Photo: chinaworker.info)