US –  The US Supreme Court has unanimously rejected an effort to restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone. The decision, which came two years after the court rescinded the nationwide guarantee to an abortion, was welcomed by pro-choice activists.

The justices decided the plaintiffs, a group of anti-abortion doctors and activists, did not have a legal right to sue. But they left the door open to other attempts to limit the availability of the drug. Mifepristone is one of two drugs used in a medication abortion, now the most common method of terminating pregnancies in the US.

The plaintiffs, known as the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, had argued that approval for the drug from US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should be withdrawn. But during arguments on the case in March, several of the court’s nine justices sounded sceptical that any of the plaintiffs had suffered harm from the availability of mifepristone – which is necessary to have the legal standing to sue.

“The plaintiffs have sincere legal, moral, ideological objections to elective abortion and to FDA’s relaxed regulation,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the court, “but they failed to demonstrate” any actual injury. “A plaintiff’s desire to make a drug less available for others does not establish standing to sue,” he also wrote. The top court overturned Roe v Wade, effectively rescinding a federal right to abortion, in June 2022. Since then, 21 states have moved to restrict abortion earlier in pregnancy than the standard it had set. Seventeen of those have barred the procedure at six weeks or earlier.

Thursday’s ruling has no bearing on these laws – medication abortion remains illegal in states that prohibit abortion. But abortion pills have acted as an effective workaround to the bans, with thousands of pills flowing into restrictive states through the mail.

Pro-choice activists were encouraged that access to abortion pills had been preserved, but warned the Supreme Court’s decision was a qualified victory. At least three states – Missouri, Kansas and Idaho – have also opposed the FDA’s approval of the drug in court. The Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday does not rule out these future challenges.

“This ruling is not a ‘win’ for abortion, it just maintains the status quo,” said Nancy Northup, president of the pro-choice Center for Reproductive Rights in a statement. “The attacks on abortion pills will not stop here – the anti-abortion movement sees how critical abortion pills are in this post-Roe world.”

In a statement, President Joe Biden echoed those comments, saying the ruling “does not change the fact that the fight for reproductive freedom continues”. “The stakes could not be higher for women across America,” he said. Anti-abortion groups criticised the decision. But these groups, too, indicated the fight would continue. (BBC)…[+]

RUSSIA  –  A group of international human rights lawyers has accused Russia of intentionally starving the civilians of Mariupol as a method of warfare during its 85-day siege of the Ukrainian city in early 2022.

A 76-page dossier published by the Starvation Mobile Justice Team of the human rights organization Global Rights Compliance looks in detail at the siege, which it described as “hell on earth” for the port city’s residents, through the lens of the war crime of starvation as a calculated strategy.

It found that Russian forces “systematically attacked objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population,” while at the same time cutting off evacuation routes and blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid. Ukrainian civilians were cut off from water, electricity and gas and forced to drink from puddles, radiators and melted snow.

The findings didn’t come as a surprise to Nikolai Osychenko, who described living through the siege as a “Stone Age” experience. “The Russians bombed the substation that supplied electricity to Mariupol on March 2 and we lost electricity, and at the same time, we also lost the water supply and heating,” he told CNN, adding that the city started running out of food almost immediately, because without electricity, much of it has gone bad. “We all realized that flour is the best thing to have. If you have water and flour, you can cook something. But without water, you can’t do anything,” he said.

The Mariupol resident spent two weeks living in one apartment with nine other people, rationing food and scraping together any water they could find. They would spend two days melting buckets of snow with their hand, only to get a few inches of dirty water. Osychenko told CNN that at one point, he drank the water from his radiators, boiling it 20 times over to purify it. Deliberately causing starvation and deprivation constitutes a war crime under international law. The group is in the process of submitting their latest report to the International Criminal Court (ICC) as part of a larger dossier on Russia’s use of starvation.

According to their website, the organization is funded by the governments of the EU Commission, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. (CNN)…[+]