The United States has long claimed a kind of exceptionalism in relation to international human rights standards, supporting their development, funding their enforcement elsewhere, and exempting itself from their application at home. Civil society organizations, including many that work on the rule of law, have often accommodated that posture, treating international mechanisms as tools for other contexts, rather than as standards that apply universally.

That posture is increasingly difficult to sustain. What is happening to courts and judges in the United States is being measured against exactly those standards: by the U.N. human rights system, by international legal bodies, by colleagues around the world who have watched these patterns before. The current moment raises questions not only about how to respond to the crisis at hand but about the exceptionalism that arguably made it easier to arrive here.

A framework that always applied

Judicial independence is not merely a matter of domestic institutional design. It is a guarantee of international human rights law.

The U.N. Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary, adopted by the General Assembly in 1985, require states to guarantee judicial independence in their constitutions or law, to ensure that judges are not subject to inappropriate interference, to protect their freedom of expression, and to recognize the role of professional associations in maintaining standards and protecting members from unjustified attack. The Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, adopted in 1990, establish that lawyers have a duty to support human rights and fundamental freedoms, and that professional associations must cooperate with governments to ensure effective and equal access to legal services.

Both instruments reflect a conclusion confirmed repeatedly across many countries and political systems: Judicial independence and the free exercise of the legal profession are human rights prerequisites, not institutional niceties. Without them, the right to a fair trial, due process and access to justice are paper guarantees. The U.N. mandate to monitor the independence of judges and lawyers was created in 1994 precisely because these threats proved recurring and cross-jurisdictional and because no country’s domestic commitments, however well established, were sufficient protection on their own.

In May 2025, U.N. Special Rapporteur Margaret Satterthwaite, the U.N.’s independent expert on the independence of judges and lawyers, expressed formal alarm at what she described as “an apparent organized effort to interfere in the independence of the U.S. legal and judicial system.” Her statement was unambiguous: “The targeting of legal professionals solely for performing their role in the justice system poses a significant and direct threat to the integrity and fairness of legal proceedings in the United States and could jeopardize the right to a fair trial.”

The special rapporteur noted executive orders banning law firms from government buildings, stripping lawyers of security clearances, and characterizing legal professionals as adversaries of the state. She called on the U.S. “to adhere to these standards and stop all efforts to interfere in the work of lawyers, law firms and judges.” A formal communication from the special rapporteur places the situation on record within the U.N. human rights system and establishes a baseline against which further developments will be measured.

The European legal community registered parallel concern. In January, the Day of the Endangered Lawyer, an annual observance typically dedicated to countries where lawyers face imprisonment or violence for their work, was directed at the United States for the first time.

What international experience teaches: The Polish case

The United States is not the first democracy to face a coordinated, multibranch assault on its courts. Poland’s experience between 2015 and 2023 is the most thoroughly documented case of such an assault and of what organized resistance, sustained over years and anchored in international solidarity, can achieve.

Poland’s Law and Justice party systematically dismantled judicial independence over eight years: packing the Constitutional Tribunal, creating a politically controlled National Council of the Judiciary, establishing a Disciplinary Chamber with the power to remove judges for “political activity,” and running state media campaigns against individual judges. Several features of the resistance that followed proved consequential:

  • Polish judges traveled repeatedly to Brussels, lobbied the EU to invoke Article 7 proceedings, and drafted legal opinions for EU institutions, making Poland’s judicial crisis an EU-level issue, rather than a domestic matter the government could contain.

  • Lawyers formed the Free Courts Foundation, which handled cases before the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU, creating international legal precedent that would outlast the government itself.

  • In January 2020, judges organized the “March of 1,000 Robes.” Over 30,000 people participated, including judges from 22 other European countries, transforming a domestic protest into a visible expression of transnational professional solidarity.

When democratic forces won Poland’s 2023 elections, courts were battered but standing. International pressure had not resolved the crisis alone, but it had raised the costs of the assault, slowed institutional dismantling, and created the legal and political record on which restoration could be built. That combination of documentation, legal challenge and sustained solidarity is a methodology refined across many contexts, and the relationships and mechanisms that made it possible remain available.

Solidarity and international standards

International experience consistently shows that resistance holds when lawyers and judges stand together, visibly and across institutional lines, around a shared principle. The Polish case and others document a recurring pattern: professional solidarity, when sustained, raises the political cost of judicial interference in ways that individual institutional responses cannot.

A recurring challenge in such environments is the framing of any institutional defense as political partisanship. International observers and comparative legal scholars have noted that this framing, treating any defense of judicial independence as evidence of ideological alignment, is itself a feature of coordinated assaults on courts.

The U.S. Judicial Conference’s Committee on Codes of Conduct has released a new advisory opinion that addresses the attacks on the federal judiciary. The opinion explicitly states that federal judges are permitted to publicly defend their judicial independence and the rule of law, critical affirmation of the judiciary’s important role, in line with international standards.

International standards for the protection of judicial independence exist and are directly applicable to what is happening in the United States now. For bar associations national and state alike, that framework is available as a practical tool.

The U.N. Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers establish what professional associations are obligated to do when judicial independence is under threat: defend lawyers from unjustified attack, support access to justice, and maintain the conditions under which the rule of law can function. Many bars are already doing this work—passing resolutions, supporting threatened judges, pushing for legislation—without necessarily framing it in international human rights terms.

That framing matters. It connects domestic efforts to jurisprudence with global authority and to solidarity networks with real experience in these fights. Invoking international standards will not immunize that work from political attack; unfortunately, internationalism itself has become a target, and bar associations should expect that. But grounding the work in these standards strengthens the framework itself—for the United States, where the rule of law needs every foundation it can find, and for an international system that is more durable when its most powerful actors are held to it, rather than exempt from it.

Zamira Djabarova is a senior legal adviser at the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights, where she spearheads initiatives on judicial independence, labor rights and corporate accountability, and protection of human rights defenders. Her work focuses on combating strategic lawsuits against public participation, also known as SLAPPs, advancing freedom of association and strengthening access to justice.