Newsletter: December 2025

UN Submission: Input on Terrorism Definitions

On behalf of Defending Rights & Dissent, our Policy Director Chip Gibbons submitted a response to the United Nations’ call for input regarding how to define “terrorism”, “terrorist organizations” and “violent extremism.” Ben Saul, Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, issued the request because in his view, human rights groups and the UN have relied on “vague and overbroad definitions of terrorism” which are “prone to abuse and often lead to violations of fundamental human rights, including against members of civil society.”

In our submission, Gibbons warns,

 “Definitions that include minor property damage or vandalism open up the door for nonviolent crimes, including civil disobedience, to be investigated as terrorism….Other definitions of terrorism that focus on blacklisting organizations and banning support for them broadly turn otherwise lawful political speech or even humanitarian aid into serious terrorism felonies.”

Instead, we write, terrorism definitions should be limited to acts of criminal violence that intentionally pose a substantial risk to human life and that are not committed in an armed conflict zone by an actor who is part of an armed conflict.

Read our full submission to the UN call for terrorism definition input.

Dick Cheney’s Legacy of Brutal Carnage

Dick Cheney, one of the most powerful Vice Presidents in modern U.S. history, died last month at the age of 84. Cheney is known foremost for his role in the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Chip Gibbons recounted Cheney’s history of repression, bloodshed, and wanton corruption in a comprehensive obituary for Jacobin. “When reflecting on Cheney’s legacy,” he writes, “we are obligated to acknowledge the millions of lives he cut short.”

His legacy lives on in the present, as Chip argues:

“Not only is Cheney responsible for his own attacks on democracy, but there are solid through lines between him and Trump. Trump’s first campaign was marked by calls for surveillance of mosques, support for torture, escalating air wars in the Middle East, and retaliatory killing of “terrorists’” families. Can anyone seriously argue these are not the logical extensions of Cheney’s war on terror?”

Read the full obit over at Jacobin.

Hegseth’s Illegal Orders

The Trump administration has ratcheted up military aggression both at home and abroad. Domestically, the National Guard has been deployed to counter ICE protesters in several major cities. Meanwhile, the U.S. has conducted more than 20 strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean in the last few months, killing dozens of civilians without due process. The military has also been stationing war ships off the coast of Venezuela, where Trump appears to want regime change. 

Defending Rights & Dissent hosted a livestreamed discussion with law professor and legal scholar Marjorie Cohn, in conversation with our policy director Chip Gibbons, about extrajudicial drone strikes, lawmakers urging servicemembers to disobey illegal orders, and whether Sec. Pete Hegseth should be impeached and tried.

Read more and watch the full event here.

Defending Rights & Dissent Represents U.S. Civil Society at International Summit

Defending Rights & Dissent joined representatives of civil society organizations from 21 North, South, and Central American countries in Bogota, Colombia, in November at the Intercontinental Summit on the Closing of Civic Space in the Americas, sponsored by Amnesty International. Defending Rights & Dissent Executive Director Sue Udry was one of three U.S. delegates invited to attend.

The summit brought together human rights defenders from across the Americas to discuss strategies, learnings, and good practices in this work and explore ways we can collaborate to fight back against the growing authoritarianism across the region.

“The meeting made it possible to compare realities, recognize common patterns, and better understand shared challenges,” Udry said. “Even after reading books and articles on the road to authoritarianism, it was eye-opening – and disturbing – to meet with delegates from countries that are further down the road than the U.S. is, and hear about their experiences and how they are organizing to protect human rights against tremendous repression.

Read more about our attendance at Amnesty’s summit.

WikiLeaks FOIA Court Appearance

On Tuesday December 9, Defending Rights & Dissent was again at the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia for an in-person status hearing in our case to compel the FBI to release its files on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. We previously filed a FOIA request on WikiLeaks, but the request was rejected on the grounds that there was an ongoing criminal investigation. Following Julian Assange’s plea deal, we immediately refiled the request for files on WikiLeaks. Given that Assange was forced to give up his FOIA rights as part of his plea deal, we also expanded the scope of our request to include Assange.

Currently, the FBI is conducting a review of the files, which will be completed by November 2026. At which point, the FBI plans to argue that both the files on Assange and WikiLeaks are categorically exempt from disclosure as their release would cause an unwarranted invasion of privacy for an individual. FOIA does contain privacy exemptions, but a public interest balancing test must be applied. FOIA’s privacy exemptions extend only to living humans, not an organization like WikiLeaks. This makes their claim that the privacy exemption would prohibit the release of any files on WikiLeaks deeply perplexing. 

The government’s latest count puts the total number of pages of documents at 138,000. Given the volume of files, we have agreed to negotiate a narrowing of the request with the FBI. This is to avoid processing files that may reference WikiLeaks but do not pertain to the FBI’s investigation of the organization for publishing U.S. secrets. This process has been made difficult due to a lack of transparency by the FBI. During the hearing, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan rebuked a government lawyer representing the FBI for not knowing when the FBI started its review of the documents or how many pages they have processed.