The Guardian: ‘Endangered lawyer’ day highlights US justice system’s plummeting standing

International coalition of legal groups focuses on political intimidation of lawyers and judges in US – once a role model

The US has been awarded a new dubious distinction: it has been selected as this year’s focus of an international coalition of legal groups and bar associations as a country where lawyers and judges are so politically intimidated that the rule of law is under threat.

The decision to put the spotlight on the US for Thursday’s “International Day of the Endangered Lawyer” underlines how rapidly America has plummeted in global esteem. For decades the US has been held up as a role model of a democratic judicial system.

Now, just a year into Donald Trump’s renewed presidency, it is widely seen around the world as a state in which lawyers and judges are attacked just for doing their jobs.

The “endangered lawyer” epithet brings the US into the company of dictatorships and autocracies that have been previous holders of the title. Last year’s focus was Belarus, while other highlighted states since 2010 when the annual event was created include Afghanistan, Iran and China.

The US was selected through a vote of more than 40 bar associations and lawyer organisations globally. A report released by the coalition on Thursday explained the decision by saying that members were alarmed by the Trump administration’s “sustained and co-ordinated campaign aimed at undermining the independence of the legal profession and the judiciary”.

It added that the past 12 months displayed a “troubling pattern of political intimidation and institutional destabilization unprecedented in the modern history of the US”.

Symone Gaasbeek, a co-founder of the coalition, said that it was surprising to find a country normally lauded for its commitment to democracy and justice added to the list of largely authoritarian countries. Speaking to the Guardian from the Netherlands, she said that “we look at the facts, we don’t deal in labels”.

Led by the facts, she said, “you see a systematic attack on the legal profession in the US. As the past year has progressed, those attacks have intensified – it has become more and more clear that the government is trying to control the legal profession and that the rule of law is threatened.”

One of the influences behind the coalition’s decision was the work of the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Margaret Satterthwaite. She acts as an independent monitor of the treatment of legal professionals around the world.

Over the past year Satterthwaite has raised mounting concerns about the actions of the Trump administration. She has sent two official letters to top US diplomats and the US state department objecting to the abusive treatment of American lawyers.

The first letter, sent a month after Trump’s inauguration, objected to the dismissal of scores of career lawyers from the Department of Justice. The firings were in apparent retaliation for their participation in earlier prosecutions against Trump over the January 6 insurrection and other alleged crimes.

The second letter, dated 6 May 2025, addressed the attacks emanating from Trump and his inner circle against judges who had ruled against the administration. Those assaults included Trump’s call for the impeachment of James Boasberg, chief judge of the US district court in Washington DC, after Boasberg blocked the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

The president called the judge a “radical left lunatic” and a “troublemaker”.

Satterthwaite told the Guardian that presidents were entitled to publicly disagree with court rulings. But, she said, “this kind of smearing is completely inappropriate”.

The UN rapporteur said that in other countries such verbal assaults had incited violence against judges. She pointed to the Philippines under the former strongman president Rodrigo Duterte.

In the US, scores of federal judges have endured a wave of violent threats in the wake of Trump’s rhetorical attacks. Several have been intimidated by anonymous pizza deliveries to their homes.

Satterthwaite said the ominous pizza deliveries were a “horribly good example” of the dangers of vilifying judges. “Attacking lawyers and judges for their work is a hallmark authoritarian move,” the UN monitor said.

She added that the administration had so far failed to reply to either of her official letters.