In previous posts, the Zealous has highlighted the International Day of the Endangered Lawyer when the focus was on Iran, where human rights attorneys like Amirsalar Davoudi faced thirty years in prison and 111 lashes for the crime of defending political prisoners. Afghanistan was another, where the Taliban seized the bar association’s databases, containing home addresses, family members, and case histories, and used them to hunt down lawyers who had represented women, human rights activists, or anyone associated with international organizations. Seven lawyers were killed. One hundred forty-six were arrested or investigated. Women were banned from the profession entirely.
This year, the Coalition for the International Day of the Endangered Lawyer announced its focus country for 2026. It’s the United States.
Let that land for a moment.
A recurring theme of this blog is that the rule of law isn’t an abstraction debated in jurisprudence seminars. It’s the operating system for everything we do. When the rule of law is functionally absent, as scholars have documented in places like Myanmar, lawyers cannot play the same role as in democratic regimes. They become fixers navigating a marketplace of bribes rather than advocates for justice. The profession loses prestige. It loses purpose. Practicing law in the absence of the rule of law, as this blog has noted before, kinda sucks.
The United States appearing on the same annual roster as Iran, Belarus, Afghanistan, Turkey, China, and Colombia is not an equivalence. American lawyers are not being murdered or imprisoned for their advocacy. But the Coalition’s selection is a warning, and it’s worth understanding why an international body of fifty legal and human rights organizations looked at the global landscape and concluded that American lawyers now merit the world’s concern.
The Massacre at Atocha
For readers unfamiliar with the observance, the Day of the Endangered Lawyer is held each January 24 to commemorate the Atocha massacre. On that date in 1977, neo-fascist extremists opposed to democratic rule entered a law office at Calle Atocha 55 in Madrid and murdered four labor lawyers and a co-worker. The massacre became a pivotal moment in Spain’s transition to democracy.
Every year since 2010, the Coalition has marked the anniversary by spotlighting a country where lawyers face heightened risks for doing their jobs. The purpose, as the Coalition states, is "to draw the attention of government officials, international institutions, civil society, the media and the general public to the plight of lawyers in a particular focus country, to raise awareness about the threats the lawyers in that country face in the exercise of their profession."
Previous focus countries, in addition to Iran and Afghanistan, include Belarus, Colombia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, China, Honduras, and the Philippines. These are not places American lawyers traditionally expected to be grouped with. The premise of this blog, that lawyers should take pride in their essential societal role, depends on the existence of a system that honors that role. That system is under threat.
Why the United States, and Why Now
The European Criminal Bar Association proposed the United States as the 2026 focus country based on what it described as "serious concerns over escalating attacks against lawyers in the U.S. in 2025," including "executive orders targeting law firms, harassment, political reprisals, and discriminatory measures that undermine the vital independence of the legal profession."
The UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Margaret Satterthwaite, stated that the attacks perpetrated on American lawyers in a single year were "the kind you might see over a series of years" in countries undergoing autocratization.
Vânia Costa Ramos, the ECBA representative who pitched the U.S. selection, explained the stakes: "The fact that this is happening in a country that is democratic and known to be a champion of the rule of law is even more concerning because it shows…backsliding on the rule of law can happen anywhere."
A Pattern of Measures
The report documents what it calls "a sustained and coordinated campaign aimed at undermining the independence of the legal profession, the judiciary, and related institutions" throughout 2025. The concerns fall into several categories.
First, executive orders and presidential memoranda have explicitly targeted named law firms and individual lawyers for their past or present legal representation, advocacy, or pro bono work. The firms affected include Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Elias Law Group, and WilmerHale. The sanctions have included suspension of security clearances, denial of access to federal facilities, and review or cancellation of government contracts. Several firms, along with the American Bar Association, have initiated constitutional challenges against these measures.
Second, the report documents surveillance, questioning, and harassment of lawyers at borders and through administrative channels, including demands related to their legal work.
Third, judicial independence has come under what the Coalition describes as "increased assault." The report cites "the mounting barrage of politicized criticism directed at judges" including threats of removal, calls for impeachment, and efforts to delegitimize unfavorable rulings. This politicized criticism, the report notes, is also associated with increased threats of physical violence against members of the judiciary.
Fourth, and perhaps most insidiously, the report identifies a growing chilling effect on legal advocacy. "Many law firms—even those that were once bold in taking public-interest or politically risky cases—now confront implicit incentives to self-censor." When representing an unpopular client becomes a commercial or personal liability, the profession’s essential function, ensuring that everyone, including the despised, has access to counsel, begins to erode.
What This Means for Practicing Lawyers
The UN Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, cited in previous posts on this topic, are explicit about what governments owe the legal profession. Principle 16 requires that lawyers "are able to perform all of their professional functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference" and "shall not suffer, or be threatened with, prosecution or administrative, economic or other sanctions for any action taken in accordance with recognized professional duties, standards and ethics." Principle 18 provides that "Lawyers shall not be identified with their clients or their clients’ causes as a result of discharging their functions."
These are not lofty aspirations. They are the baseline requirements for a functioning legal system. When lawyers can be punished for whom they represent, or when the act of representation itself becomes a basis for retaliation, we are no longer talking about a system governed by law. We are talking about something else.
The Coalition’s statement puts it plainly: "Any attack on the independence of the legal profession is an attack on the core of democracy." And as the European magistrates’ organization MEDEL observed, "When lawyers are targeted for fulfilling this role, the harm extends far beyond the profession itself—it undermines democratic governance and weakens public confidence in the justice system."
This is the through line that connects Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and now the United States. The degradation of the legal profession is not merely a professional concern. It is a warning sign. It is the canary in the constitutional coal mine.
What Lawyers Can Do
This blog’s mission has always been to address issues lawyers face while celebrating the profession’s essential dignity. In that spirit, a word about what can be done.
Awareness matters. The Day of the Endangered Lawyer exists precisely because attention has power. The firms facing executive action have not capitulated quietly. They have filed constitutional challenges. The ABA has joined the fight. State and local bar associations are raising their voices.
This is what a profession defending itself looks like.
The Council of Europe adopted, in May 2025, the first legally binding international instrument designed to safeguard the independence and safety of the legal profession. The Coalition is urging all member states to ratify it promptly. This kind of international pressure may seem distant from daily practice, but it establishes norms that matter, and it signals that the world is watching.
And for individual lawyers, there is the most fundamental act of all: continuing to represent clients zealously, including the unpopular ones, including the ones whose cases make powerful people uncomfortable. This is not politics. This is what we do. This is what lawyers have always done, from John Adams defending British soldiers after the Boston Massacre to the attorneys who represented Guantánamo detainees. The right to counsel means nothing if it evaporates the moment the client becomes controversial or disfavored.
A Warning, Not an Equivalence
Let's be clear about what the U.S. selection means. American lawyers are not being assassinated like Ko Ni in Myanmar. They are not facing thirty years in prison like Amirsalar Davoudi in Iran. They are not being hunted by a regime that seized their bar association’s databases, as in Afghanistan.
But the Coalition’s report makes the point that threats to lawyers are not confined to countries with political systems widely acknowledged as authoritarian or fragile. The United States was selected precisely because it demonstrates that even well-established legal systems are not immune to authoritarian rule.
The erosion doesn’t arrive all at once. It arrives in increments; an executive order here, a threat there, a chilling effect that causes firms to think twice before taking certain cases. And then one day you look around and realize that the system that once made being a lawyer meaningful has been hollowed out from within. We must ensure that this day never arrives in the United States of America.
