Xander Peters

Kyle Collard; his wife, Damie Liepitz; and mother-in-law, Mindy Liepitz, comb through the wreckage outside Mindy’s home in North Fort Myers, Florida. They are surprised a table Damie made in middle school survived the storm surge.

For Mindy Liepitz, it was just stuff in the end.

A two-inch layer of black mud lies between the bottom of her shoes and the floor of her modest two-bedroom rental home in North Fort Myers. Her furniture is waterlogged, ruined. The electronics throughout her home are lost – the computer, the refrigerator, the microwave, a funny Tyrannosaurus rex-shaped lamp she bought last week. Her car floated into the neighbor’s yard.

It can all be replaced, Ms. Liepitz says.

It didn’t feel like that last week, before Hurricane Ian, a Category 4, and its 150 mph winds veered south from its initial arc toward Tampa and made landfall in southwest Florida on Wednesday. Her possessions had helped define her. Just two months ago, Ms. Liepitz hauled everything she owned from Colorado to Fort Myers, following the same path as her daughter and son-in-law – Damie Liepitz and Kyle Collard – who purchased a houseboat on the marina and relocated last year.

“We sold my place and I moved down here and I set up my little world, never expecting a 500-year flood,” Ms. Liepitz says. “But in a way, it’s a fresh start for me. I’m really OK with it.”

She points to a watermark near the living room light switch. Ian’s surge resulted in more than 4 feet of water in her home. It was already pooling up to her ankles when she initially called her daughter and son-in-law to evacuate her to the condominium where they were waiting out the storm with neighbors. Within minutes, water had made it to her knees. By the time Mr. Collard arrived in his pickup, it had reached as high as Ms. Liepitz’s chest. Mr. Collard had to force his way through her front door as the storm’s surge lapped against it, holding it shut.

Ms. Liepitz stops in the middle of the room. She takes another long look around and walks back outside, where the sound of birds can be heard in the distance. It’s a warm autumn day.

Southwest Florida residents like Ms. Liepitz and her family are only beginning to find words in their reaction to Ian’s devastation across their region. As their surroundings lie in physical tatters, however, they are relying on cooperation and care for one another as they begin working as communities to persevere beyond the damage of a historic storm, while leaning on what remains.

“It’s hour by hour right now,” Mr. Collard says.

Xander Peters

The inside of Mindy Liepitz’s home in North Fort Myers following Hurricane Ian. She took on more than 4 feet of water in roughly 45 minutes. Her son-in-law, Kyle Collard, had to come rescue her in his pickup truck.

Prior to Ian’s landfall, roughly 2.5 million Floridians were issued evacuation orders. It was the largest temporary exodus the state has seen since prior to Hurricane Irma’s landfall in 2017, when by some estimates nearly 7 million Floridians evacuated.

Storm’s heavy toll

Those who opted to stay saw a storm surge inundate neighborhoods up to 12 miles inland, such as Ms. Liepitz’s in North Fort Myers. That was as areas across southwest Florida took on 10 inches or more of rain in a matter of hours. Deaths attributed to the storm were edging close to 100 by some counts on Monday, including four fatalities in North Carolina, where heavy rains followed a second landfall by Ian, in South Carolina, Friday morning. Federal officials estimated more than 4,000 emergency rescues occurred in Florida alone.

Early recovery estimates, putting damage at perhaps $100 billion, cite Ian as the costliest storm in the state’s history. The firm CoreLogic, which analyzes natural disaster costs, estimates between $28 billion and $47 billion in insured losses alone.

Between Ian’s Gulf and Atlantic coast landfalls, President Joe Biden declared a major disaster and pledged federal aid. He promised that the federal government will cover the full costs of search and rescue efforts and cleaning up debris and will help rebuild schools and infrastructure. He also offered financial assistance to residents with inadequate homeowner’s insurance.

As of this past weekend, work to restore the norm was well underway at the state level, too. Florida Power and Light, the state’s largest utility operator, had already restored power to about 1.5 million customers’ homes. At midday Monday, more than 300,000 households remained without electricity.

“This is how you do it”

Those still temporarily in the dark, like Phoebe Presson, a pastor at the St. Phillip CME Church in Fort Myers, began to take it on themselves to aid their friends and neighbors.

On Saturday afternoon, Ms. Presson helped organize supply distribution for the church members.

Ms. Presson only recently relocated to her new post in Fort Myers from Alabama after she was reassigned by a church leader. Ian was the first hurricane she’s witnessed in person, but she’s no stranger to the upheaval that comes after natural disasters. Before Ian last week, Ms. Presson had years of experience in helping administer disaster aid to communities following storms, like Hurricane Maria, which devastated the small island of Puerto Rico in 2018. To be on the opposite end of who’s receiving help, for Ms. Presson, is a humbling moment.

“I pretty much understood what I was getting ready to visualize,” Ms. Presson says of her mindset as she, like other residents who remained, stepped outside in the first light after Ian.

The questions have already begun to surface about whether state and local officials acted swiftly enough in ordering evacuations for residents in parts of southwest Florida ­– with some official evacuation orders handed down barely 24 hours prior to Ian’s landfall. But from the vantage of her community, Ms. Presson says she’s so far proud of the government response.

“Federal government, local government, and our community coming together – this is how you do it,” she says of how she’s seen others begin to rally around Fort Myers’ needs.

But Ian’s tests will continue for months and years into the future, she adds.

Fort Myers Beach, which is among the city’s economic lifelines as a tourism and nightlife destination, was razed in the storm. She understands that the city will take a hit as a result.

“It’s going to take some time,” she says. “But I do believe that we’ll be OK.”

For the Liepitz and Collard family, it was not only their first hurricane experience but also the first time to experience a community’s perseverance after a natural disaster.  

“It’s really inspiring to see everybody come together the way that they always talk about on the news,” says the younger Ms. Liepitz, referring to the recent generosity of their neighbors, who have shared food and shelter. Together, they’ve siphoned gas from their flooded vehicles as a means of keeping the generator – which they are also sharing – functioning.

“You watch from 2,000 miles away and your heart breaks.” But, she adds, one can’t fully understand before living through both the storm and its aftermath as a community.

Getting out just in time

The water had already risen to past the bottom of his pickup truck’s doors by the time Mr. Collard made it to his mother-in-law’s home to rescue her. He’d traveled no more than a mile. 

As they whipped out of her driveway back toward their temporary shelter, Mr. Collard looked at his mother-in-law and said, “You played that down,” referring to her home’s flooding.

“I know,” Ms. Liepitz remembers saying. She didn’t want to scare her daughter.

Behind them, they could see her car being pushed further down the street by the wake of his truck.

The most valuable of Ms. Liepitz’s possessions hadn’t even crossed her mind at that point. Instead, it was the silly, sentimental items she knew she would miss the most, like the ceramic octopus salt-and-pepper shaker she bought shortly after relocating to Fort Myers in July.

But there atop her stove’s control board sat the salt-and-pepper shaker, unscathed.

Seeing it, exactly where she left it, lifted her spirits.  

Inside her wrecked home, Ms. Liepitz points to a pair of bronzed baby shoes sitting on a shelf near the broken TV. The shoes were hers as an infant; from place to place, across life, she’s carried them around for as long as she can remember. They’re ruined now. Ms. Liepitz doesn’t have to carry them anymore. She views the shoes as symbolic of the change occurring in her life. 

Even after her move this past summer, Ms. Liepitz recalls feeling lost, despite a monthslong focus on relocating to Florida and starting her new life.

Ian changed everything, she says.

“There’s a piece of me that’s OK with throwing it all away,” she says of her possessions. The storm is propelling her headlong toward the new life she promised herself.  

Crossing the slender span of ragged concrete above the Oskil River – all that remains of what was once the Kupiansk bridge – was an exhausted and emotional migration of people, both civilian and military, navigating a war zone.

With Ukraine pressing an advance that had already forced a Russian retreat from more than 3,000 square miles of occupied territory in eastern Kharkiv province, the bombed bridge was the only path for Ukrainian civilians east of the Oskil to escape the increasingly destructive battlefront.

As Ukraine rushed armored columns east across two floating pontoon bridges late last week, the air shook with the steady concussion of outgoing Ukrainian artillery. A Russian drone whirred overhead, looking to target the critical crossing points and sending soldiers hurrying for cover.

Caught between Ukraine’s advances and Russian defenses are villages and towns east of the Oskil that for seven months of Russian occupation were spared the war’s most destructive forces but have now been transformed into its front.

The result is a sudden exodus of civilians seeking safety, who thread their way over what is left of the bridge. Along with their few bags and some pets, they carry stories of survival, resilience, and raw emotion as the war has swept over them.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Ukrainian pensioner Gulfira Kharasik wipes away a tear as her family joins hundreds of Ukrainian civilians gathered at an evacuation point, after fleeing on foot across a heavily damaged bridge over the Oskil River, in Kupiansk, Ukraine, Sept. 30, 2022.

In a final, grotesque reminder of the conflict they are leaving behind, evacuees must walk past the body of a Russian soldier lying as a silent sentry at the eastern end of the bridge.

“When the Russians ran away, they shot at everyone, and destroyed everything,” says one man, from a cluster of evacuees awaiting transport. They sometimes flinch when a Ukrainian artillery team – unseen, but nearby – launches shells toward Russian positions.

In the first day of organized evacuations Thursday, 750 people crossed, according to volunteers who shuttle them westward to Kharkiv. On Friday by 1 p.m., already 500 to 600 had crossed.

Ukrainian forces over the weekend captured the strategic rail hub of Lyman, 50 miles southeast of Kupiansk, after encircling the town and triggering a chaotic Russian withdrawal. Moscow later said Russian forces had been ordered back “to more advantageous lines.”

Control of Lyman by Ukraine will not only hamper Russian reinforcement and resupply efforts in the eastern Donbas region – which President Vladimir Putin has described as the focus of the Russian invasion after failing to seize the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv last March – but also provide a launchpad for deeper Ukrainian advances into Russian-controlled territory.

SOURCE:

Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Critical Threats Project

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Mr. Putin on Friday announced that Russia had annexed two regions that make up the Donbas, along with the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions to the south, and that all Ukrainian residents there would henceforth be Russian citizens “forever,” after hastily arranged and widely condemned referendums last week.

Any attack on them would be considered an attack on the Russian homeland, he said. But Mr. Putin did not mention recent battlefield setbacks, nor the fact that Moscow does not control all of any of the so-called incorporated regions.

“The war is here. Go.”

Such high-level political maneuvering means little to those caught in the counteroffensive.

“We don’t want to leave our home,” says Gulfira Kharasik, a pensioner in a pale maroon jacket, wiping away a tear. She stands amid a group that had just crossed over the bridge and the marshy expanse of the Oskil River basin Friday and was awaiting transfer to the west.

“There was shelling for a week, but yesterday and last night it was very tough,” she says. “The whole area was bombed.”

In the end, a chain of events that brought the war home made her family’s decision to flee inevitable. First, a Russian tank set up position next to the fence of their summer house in the village of Hlushkivka, 9 miles southeast of Kupiansk – making the home her parents had built decades earlier an obvious Ukrainian target.

Ms. Kharasik’s husband, Ivan, also a retiree and wearing a sweat-stained “England” cap, says he then set off from the summer house on foot the 3 miles north to the family apartment at Kivsharivka. Along the way, a bomb dropped by a Russian plane landed very close to him.

“I was thrown a meter,” he says of the blast.

Mr. Kharasik sought shelter in a basement, but was found by Russian troops. He says they told him, “The war is here. Go.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A Ukrainian couple pass a wrecked car marked with the Z symbol used by the Russian military, in Kupiansk, Ukraine, Sept. 30, 2022. Ukraine has recaptured thousands of square miles of its northeast Kharkiv region from Russian occupation forces in recent weeks.

Upon reaching the apartment where his wife and adult son, Dmytro, were staying, the shelling intensified. The family describes a direct hit on a nearby apartment block that killed two of their neighbors, whom they saw were thrown outside by the blast.

They know another neighbor who died, also.

Dmytro shows a picture on his phone of where the local Orthodox church once stood, across the street from his house. Aged and made of wood, it was hit and burned to the ground.

“Now it is only a fence,” he says of all that is visible in the photograph.

Evacuating wounded people

Russian lines have been falling back from Kupiansk. Witnesses who visited the city days earlier describe being able to hear Ukrainian shells landing much closer, on the east side of the Oskil. On Friday, the targets of the steady Ukrainian shelling were farther away, and the impacts could rarely be heard.

Ukrainian soldiers say the east side of the river is still not “cleaned” entirely of Russians, with many of them still hiding. But their bigger concern Friday was an expected artillery barrage on the pontoon bridges across the Oskil that saw constant military traffic feeding the advancing counteroffensive.

At a muddy intersection on the west side of the river, in a residential area that blocked any view of the pontoon crossings, a handful of Ukrainian soldiers jumped up at the sound of a Russian surveillance drone overhead and hid beneath a metal awning.

They say one soldier was killed and three wounded in attacks on the bridges in the previous two days. Anywhere near the river, military vehicles were parked under trees or bushes to avoid easy detection from the air.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A Ukrainian soldier supports a wounded comrade as they walk to an ambulance across a heavily damaged bridge over the Oskil River in Kupiansk, Ukraine, Sept. 30, 2022. Ukraine continues to pour armored vehicles, artillery, and rocket systems into the eastern Kharkiv region in an effort to recapture all of the Donbas from Russia and allied forces.

The remains of the concrete bridge also serve as an exit from the battlefield for wounded Ukrainian soldiers. In one case, four soldiers used a makeshift canvas stretcher to carry a wounded comrade to a waiting ambulance.

In another, a soldier with his head bandaged began the walk alone, only to be joined by another, who wrapped his arm around the wounded man to support him.

The soldiers are skittish, but so are the evacuating civilians, who say they had little choice but to flee as the war came to them.

Among one group of evacuees, there were stories about recent nights spent in basements, about witnessing rocket fire from both sides, and, in one case, about a neighbor killed by shrapnel and left lying in a backyard.

Oksana Gagarinova holds her 2-year-old son Timur close, as tears well up in the baby’s eyes.

At least now, after seven months of Russian occupation, these families are able to evacuate to Ukraine and not to Russia – the only option before, says Svitlana Gulakova. She stands at the western end of the Kupiansk bridge with her teenage son and a cluster of others who just walked across the sliver of concrete.

They are anxious and emotional, but also relieved, as they await a volunteer van to take them to the next, safer place.

“There is shelling there now, so it is impossible to live,” says the bespectacled Ms. Gulakova of her home village. “It made us leave everything.”

Igor Ishchuk supported reporting for this story.

The United States Supreme Court begins a new term today with one new justice, the same 6-3 ideological divide, historically low public approval ratings, and another docket littered with blockbuster cases.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is the first Black woman to sit on the high court, which has a conservative supermajority in its second full term together. After taking a sharp rightward turn in the law – including overturning the right to abortion, expanding gun rights, strengthening religious freedom, and empowering courts to curb federal regulations – the court is again poised to hear a slate of cases with the potential to transform American life.

There are cases concerning the Clean Water Act and a Native American child-welfare law, as well as immigration enforcement. But the most high-profile cases this term concern race and elections.

“What we haven’t had yet with this new court really are cases about race, or the kind of deeply structural cases about how we govern ourselves,” says Linda Greenhouse, a longtime Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times who now teaches at Yale Law School. 

“We’re going to have both of those in this coming term,” she adds. “Combined with the term we just lived through, we’re going to be living in a new constitutional landscape by the end of it.”

Many of those high-profile cases have “off-ramps” the justices can take to issue narrower, moderate rulings. But the justices have to agree to take them, says Steven Schwinn, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago Law School.

“There was an off-ramp in Dobbs [the abortion case], there was an off-ramp in Bruen [the gun rights case], there was an off-ramp in West Virginia v. EPA,” the federal regulations case, he adds. “And the court just did not take them.”

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson receives a kiss from her husband, Dr. Patrick Jackson, during a photo opportunity outside the U.S. Supreme Court following an investiture ceremony for Justice Jackson at the court in Washington, Sept. 30, 2022.

303 Creative LLC v. Elenis

One case will see the court revisit a narrow decision it made in 2018, adjudicating a now-familiar conflict between gay rights and First Amendment protections.

The 2018 case saw a cake baker claim that having to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples violated his rights to free speech and free exercise of his religious beliefs. This case – 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis – involves a website designer, Lorie Smith, arguing that the same Colorado anti-discrimination law violates her free speech rights by forcing her to create websites with messages that contradict her beliefs about marriage. 

The Supreme Court avoided ruling on the central questions in the earlier case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Instead, a fractured seven-justice majority opinion sided with the baker on procedural grounds.

303 Creative “will force the court to confront and really wrestle with [that central] conflict,” said Paul Clement, a solicitor general for former President George W. Bush, at a Heritage Foundation panel last week.

“One thing it won’t do is give the court the out it had in Masterpiece,” he added.

Before a court with a long record of expanding religious protections, Ms. Smith is expected to prevail. What the decision could mean for state anti-discrimination laws more generally – the more significant question – is less clear.

Merrill v. Milligan

One reason the court is unlikely to take a modest approach to this term’s major cases is that one of the court’s more modest members, Chief Justice John Roberts, has a long-running personal interest in several of them.

One of those is Merrill v. Milligan. Scheduled for oral argument this week, the case asks the justices to revisit a key section of the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 law that the chief justice has crusaded against for most of his career.

He wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 case that gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which required certain states with a history of racially discriminatory voting practices to get federal approval for changes to their voting laws. And last year, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, he joined the court’s conservative majority in a ruling that an Arizona law placing new restrictions on voting and ballot collection didn’t violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits the use of discriminatory voting practices.

Section 2 is at issue again in Milligan, this time regarding racial gerrymandering. About 27% of Alabama’s voting-age population is Black, but in the state’s new congressional district map only one of seven districts is majority-Black. Local officials and activists sued, claiming the map violates Section 2, and, after a seven-day hearing in January, a three-judge district court ruled that it did, ordering Alabama to create a second majority-Black district.

Alabama’s argument to the Supreme Court is that the Voting Rights Act is requiring them to segregate Black voters, and that courts shouldn’t consider race in evaluating Section 2 challenges. 

If the court rules in Alabama’s favor, “that would be a pretty significant change in the way Section 2 cases get litigated,” said Jeff Wall, an acting solicitor general under former President Donald Trump, at the Heritage Foundation panel last week – though it would depend “on what the court says,” he added.

The consequences could be even more significant than that, some experts believe, effectively weaponizing Section 2 against its intended purpose. 

“It would severely curtail minority voters’ ability to choose candidates of their choice,” said Jonathan Diaz, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, during an American Constitution Society panel last month.

“I don’t know how you remedy problems of historic race discrimination by saying race doesn’t exist,” he added.

Affirmative action

The justices will confront another racial issue in two cases being argued in late October. They concern affirmative action programs that Harvard University and the University of North Carolina use in their admissions processes.

The court has wrestled with affirmative action for decades – and it’s another issue about which Chief Justice Roberts has long been skeptical. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he wrote in a 2007 affirmative action opinion.

So while the chief justice has often played a mediating role on the court in recent years, in the two affirmative action cases “he might actually be leading the court,” said Roman Martinez, a partner at Latham & Watkins and a former Roberts clerk, during a Georgetown University panel last month.

“Even if the court is willing to strike down Grutter” – a 2003 decision upholding university affirmative action programs – “there are options about how it does so,” he added.

An extreme ruling would bar universities from considering any kind of racial or ethnic diversity in admissions; a more moderate ruling would leave schools some leeway to promote diversity without considering race as a specific factor.

But on the current court “there are more votes that are skeptical [of affirmative action] than ever before,” said Mr. Martinez. “It’s not clear that that middle ground will prevail here.”

The independent state legislature theory 

No single case has generated more pre-term attention than what’s officially known as Moore v. Harper, but better known as “the independent state legislature theory” case – or “the ISL” case, for short.

It concerns another congressional map, drawn by the North Carolina Assembly, that the state supreme court struck down as a partisan gerrymander. (Despite the state being divided about equally between Republicans and Democrats, the map would make Republicans likely to win 10 of the state’s 14 congressional seats.)

The North Carolina Assembly’s appeal to the Supreme Court centers on the fringe independent state legislature theory. The theory holds that the word “Legislature” in the elections clause of the Constitution means that only the state legislature has the power to set the rules for congressional elections in the state. State courts, governors, even statewide ballot initiatives would have no say.

Moore is a complicated case, and as with other high-profile cases this term, the court could rule in various ways. Three members of the conservative majority have expressed support for the theory, but other justices – likely including, in this case, Chief Justice Roberts – may be hesitant to rule that state courts have no say over federal elections in their states. The chief justice’s majority opinion in a 2018 partisan gerrymandering case implicitly left these questions for states to tackle individually.

“There’s been a lot of talk about this case as involving the end of democracy and things like that, and I think that’s a bit overblown,” said Hashim Mooppan, a lawyer at the firm Jones Day, during the Georgetown panel last month.

Yet, “it is quite important in terms of the rules of the road governing congressional elections,” he added. And “there’s a whole suite of things the court can do.”

Other court watchers believe those fears aren’t overblown.

“If they hold that state legislatures cannot be limited by state supreme courts or state governors in how elections are conducted, that’s just monumental,” says Eric Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law.

The ruling “could potentially be quite modest,” says Professor Schwinn. But “I don’t think the court is going to make it modest because I don’t think that’s this court’s MO.”

Luis M. Alvarez/AP/File

Human rights attorney Jared Genser (left) greets the family of former South Sudanese political prisoner Peter Biar Ajak (right), as they arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport on July 23, 2020. They were fleeing reports of death squads on their trail.

Human rights attorney Jared Genser didn’t properly exhale until his South Sudanese client Peter Biar Ajak, his wife, two young sons, and newborn daughter touched down in Washington and walked through the customs security gate at Dulles International Airport that July 2020 evening. 

After nearly two years in a South Sudan prison and six months in a Nairobi safe house, the peace activist’s attempt to escape to the United States with his family took a terrifying turn: South Sudanese death squads were allegedly on their trail. They changed their flight for immediate departure, but that presented a harrowing technicality: They had no U.S. visas and no COVID-19 tests.

More than 7,500 miles away, on his laptop and mobile phone for six excruciating hours, Mr. Genser worked his energetic brand of triangulation – reassuring his jittery client while diplomatically shaking every tree at the Departments of Homeland Security and State to get emergency visas and testing waivers.

“He was relentless,” Dr. Ajak gratefully recalls of Mr. Genser’s constant, optimistic phone updates. Mr. Genser calmly and repeatedly assured him that he and his family would make it to the airport.  

And Mr. Genser was right.

As dramatic as it sounds, it was business as usual for the human rights lawyer who specializes in “extracting” people from unjust imprisonment in far corners of the world, from China and Venezuela to Iran and Myanmar (also known as Burma). His uncompromising goal is securing freedom for anyone held for their political or religious beliefs; his basic tools are the flashlight of hope and the know-how to influence the powerful, penning op-eds, dogging government officials, calling on human rights organizations around the world, and filing mounds of paperwork. 

He says his efforts have helped free 350 prisoners in the past decade. And, during the weekend, two more of his clients – Iranian American businessman Siamak Namazi and his father, Baquer, were closer to freedom; the younger – the longest-held American prisoner in Iranian custody – was given a temporary furlough from prison, and the elder was given freedom to travel.

“Jared Genser ranks amongst the best in securing releases of political prisoners whose arbitrary and prolonged detentions are increasing amidst a culture of impunity,” says Irwin Cotler, former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada and founder of the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights.

Some of Mr. Genser’s most hair-raising jobs grabbed the attention of actor Orlando Bloom, who is developing a TV series on the attorney’s work. Think “West Wing” with a dash of “Scandal” where, in one scene, the sharply dressed lead character corners a senator in a marbled hallway, while in another his outspoken dissident client endures brutal prison conditions. 

Founder of Perseus Strategies, an international human rights law firm, Mr. Genser says his calling comes from an ingrained sense of obligation toward humanity and the idea that freedom should never be taken for granted. 

His sense of duty to others comes from how he has experienced vulnerability, first through Jewish grandparents who survived antisemitic pogroms in Eastern Europe before immigrating to the U.S. in the late 1800s, as well as the defining moment at age 10 when he fell into a coma with a life-threatening illness.

“I remember some of the ride to the hospital and not feeling afraid,” he says, adding that the experience inspired him to help others feel calm in vulnerable situations. 

No more “Price Is Right”

Mr. Genser, one of a few human rights attorneys in the field, doesn’t like what has, in his view, become a high-stakes game of “The Price Is Right,” or “incentivized hostage-taking.”

He traces this practice to 1979 when Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days until the U.S. released nearly $8 billion in frozen Iranian assets. In a far more recent example, seven Americans were released from a Venezuelan prison Oct. 1 in exchange for two relatives of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The latter had been serving 18-year sentences in the U.S. on drug charges.

Mr. Genser estimates that between 65 and 85 Americans and countless more foreign nationals are being wrongly held worldwide, including professional basketball star Brittney Griner, who is serving a nine-year sentence for a drug conviction in Russia. As such he’s become a powerful voice for a new way of getting people back. “Most authoritarian countries and dictators are rational actors. They know we have struck deals over and over again,” reasons Mr. Genser. “And so it’s time to introduce draconian deterrents.” 

He envisions a new multilateral approach – modeled after NATO’s Article 5. In short, a hostage taken from one signatory would be considered a hostage taken from all. Responses would include public condemnations and targeted sanctions on individuals and entities that conduct and support hostage-taking, as well as the blocking of economic development and security assistance.

“It won’t stop the practice of hostage-taking, but it can elevate the cost and make deals happen more quickly,” says Mr. Genser, who is strategizing with hostage affairs experts at the U.S. State Department to implement this approach. 

Courtesy of Jared Genser

Jared Genser (right), who estimates he's helped free more than 350 political prisoners around the world, speaks with the South African theologian and Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu in June 2015.

Putting principle into practice  

Mr. Genser first turned his principle into practice while attending Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. It was November 1997 and Chinese President Jiang Zemin was coming to speak. 

“We weren’t upset the university was inviting him,” Mr. Genser says. “We were angry Harvard was rolling out the red carpet for him and that he was going to be allowed to stay in his authoritarian bubble.” 

He and four Chinese dissidents organized a protest that drew 5,000 students outside the lecture hall – the largest protest at Harvard since the Vietnam War.

“It was so loud outside. The moderator asked Mr. Jiang what he thought about the protest, and the Chinese leader said, ‘Speak louder, I can’t hear you,’” Mr. Genser recalls.  

He took on his first case before graduating from the University of Michigan Law School. While spending a semester in London in 2000, he learned about James Mawdsley, a British Australian citizen who’d witnessed Myanmar government forces burn down a school in a refugee camp. Mr. Mawdsley was facing a potential 17-year prison sentence for publicizing it.

Mr. Genser filed the case with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in Geneva. Returning stateside that summer, he spent countless hours talking to legislative aides, ultimately persuading 23 members of Congress to sign a bipartisan letter pressing Myanmar to free Mr. Mawdsley. The State Department forwarded the letter to the Myanmar Consulate.

Later that fall back in his Ann Arbor dorm, Mr. Genser’s phone rang: Mr. Mawdsley’s release was imminent. And Mr. Genser flew to London and waited at Heathrow Airport.  

“James walked in after 415 days in solitary confinement. His mother introduced us and then he shook my hand and said, ‘Thanks, you saved my life.’” Mr. Genser recounts. “I was speechless. This was why I went to law school.”

Buzzing from the success, he says, “I realized I could get a white man out of a Burmese prison, but could I get a Chinese man out of a Chinese prison, a Sudanese man out of a Sudanese prison?”  

Juggling classes and cases

In his first job after law school, at the multinational law firm DLA Piper, Mr. Genser learned that the Chinese government had imprisoned his former Harvard classmate and fellow protest organizer Yang Jianli.

The son of a Communist Party leader, Dr. Yang left China in 1989, disillusioned with the party. He earned the Chinese government’s ire by leading protests while attending the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard. In 2002 – with his wife’s understanding – he defiantly returned to China to support the nonviolent labor movement. Arrested and sentenced to prison, he thought he’d be forgotten.

“Jared and I had very few interactions after graduation,” Dr. Yang says. “The next time I heard his name was when my Chinese counsel visited me in prison. At the time I had been in solitary for 15 months. 

“My first reaction was, ‘That young man?’ I later learned Jared had approached my wife and offered to act as my legal counsel pro bono.”     

Mr. Genser spearheaded the effort that led to his friend’s 2007 release. He filed the case with the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and got U.S. senators from both parties and Harvard faculty to sign petitions. He also pressed the issue with the State Department. “Now I help others languishing in prison under the yoke of dictatorships around the world,” says Dr. Yang, the president and founder of Citizen Power Initiatives for China.

While Mr. Genser represents a foreign government that he wouldn’t name facing human rights challenges and serves as outside general counsel to several nonprofit organizations, more than half of his clients are pro bono. He’s working for Nicaraguan presidential candidates Juan Sebastián Chamorro and Félix Maradiaga, who have been imprisoned since before the 2021 elections.

Mr. Genser also serves as pro bono counsel for the Namazis. The younger Mr. Namazi, the Iranian American businessman, was arrested in Iran in 2015 for “collusion with an enemy state.” He was left behind during a 2016 prisoner exchange, despite Iranian government promises that release was imminent, Mr. Genser says. Iranian authorities then arrested and imprisoned the father when he visited in February that year. The father, whose travel ban was dropped this weekend, cannot travel because he’s ill.

When Roger Carstens, U.S. special presidential envoy on hostage affairs, first met Mr. Genser three years ago, he says he was impressed with his clarity of vision and tenacity. He suggested the attorney put his plan on paper. While he doesn’t recall specifics, Mr. Carstens does recall waking up to “a beautifully worded, concise document outlining the plan. He must have stayed up all night.”  

While incredible patience seems important to do his work, it’s actually relentlessness that’s required.

“I’ve done the work long enough to know that in stressful situations it’s important to take a deep breath, slow down, and try and keep my pulse at around 60,” Mr. Genser says, taking a sip from a can of Coca-Cola. 

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease. I’ll call a congressional office five, 10 times or more, but you can’t be relentless to the point of self-destruction. I can’t go ballistic. It’s all about careful calibration,” he adds.

To release stress he plays ice hockey – he keeps a stick wedged between the passenger seat and console of his Lexus.

Heng Sinith/AP/File

Theary Seng (right), a Cambodian American lawyer, and human rights lawyer Jared Genser speak with the media outside a Phnom Penh, Cambodia, court in December 2021. She was on trial with 40 other defendants accused of treason for taking part in nonviolent political activities.

One of his ongoing cases involves his friend Theary Seng, a Cambodian American lawyer, activist, and critic of Prime Minister Hun Sen. She’s serving six years for conspiracy to commit treason. After attending one of her hearings in June, he held a press conference on the steps of Phnom Penh Municipal Court and was promptly barred from Cambodia. It wasn’t the first time he was bounced: In 2016, the Maldives deported him upon arrival there in an effort to secure release of former President Mohamed Nasheed. Venezuela also banned him. Throughout his career he’s had moments of utter despondency, such as when his client Chinese writer and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was denied medical treatment for an illness while in prison until it was too late. 

“The day Xiaobo died was the worst and most painful of my career,” he says. “I know I can’t save all of my clients, and I’ve come to learn that every case is a profound failure until I succeed.”

“We usually hold falcons on our left side, so they feel the beating of our heart,” says Antonella Pintore.

A distinguished falconer now based in Bolsena, a town of breathtaking beauty by the eponymous lake in central Italy, Ms. Pintore is also a historian of the Middle Ages and an archaeologist specializing in Etruscan language and culture. 

She has trained a new batch of falconers, including Valter Zanin, who, in turn, offers courses at Serenissima falconry school in Padua. On a recent weekend, a beginners’ class is full of couples and families with children. For seven hours, participants become acquainted with two Harris’ hawks; a ferruginous hawk; royal, snowy, and barn owls; and other birds. They learn to work together with the birds as a team.

“You don’t teach them; they teach you,” Mr. Zanin says of the birds. 

Avedis Hadjian

Noemi’s fascination with falconry began with “Harry Potter” and Hedwig, the snowy owl in the series of novels and movies. Here, she holds a barn owl at Falconeria Serenissima.

Both Ms. Pintore and Mr. Zanin engage in sporting falconry that does not involve killing the quarry, unlike hunting falconry. “Play with them and they will play back,” Ms. Pintore says.  

Falconry has also found a role in a modern economy. Marco Polo Airport in Venice uses falcons for bird control. Falconer Stefano Negri works with Lady, a Harris’ hawk, to scare pigeons, ducks, herons, and other birds from the tarmac. While he is strongly attached to the animal, he’s inclined to believe that the relationship with birds of prey is essentially transactional: They work for food.

Like every falconer, Mr. Negri checks on Lady’s well-being every morning, weighing her and running a health check. As an example of interspecies cooperation, both animal and human rely on each other and are comfortable together.

Avedis Hadjian

Lady joins falconer Stefano Negri at the wheel as they head to work at the airport.

Avedis Hadjian

Lady, a Harris’ hawk, takes off on a bird-control mission along the runway of Marco Polo Airport in Venice. Falcons scare away pigeons, ducks, terns, and other birds that can interfere with aviation.

Avedis Hadjian

Mr. Negri holds Lady after the end of a long day. While he says the relationship with birds of prey is transactional – they work for food – he is very attached to Lady and looks after her well-being. Theirs is an example of interspecies cooperation.

Avedis Hadjian

Falconer Antonella Pintore holds Eclipse, affectionately known as Clippy, a spectacled owl, a species that is native to Latin America.

Editor's note: The final caption of this article has been updated to correct the type of owl featured. It is a spectacled owl.

Reuters

In the newly liberated Kharkiv region of Ukraine, a view shows a church in the village of Kozacha Lopan, Oct. 3.

In its military struggle to hold eastern Ukraine – by force and illegal annexation – Russia has also launched a campaign to ensure support from the dominant faith of Russian-speaking people. It is throwing money into the region through various pro-Kremlin organizations – with the largest recipient being the Russian Orthodox Church and its charities.

Since the takeover of Crimea in 2014, President Vladimir Putin has relied heavily on the church’s hierarchy to support his efforts to expand the borders of Russia by force and, lately, in the conscription of young men to fight in Ukraine. At the same time, Russian forces have destroyed more than 200 facilities of other religions in Ukraine – churches, mosques, synagogues – since the war began in February, according to Ukrainian officials.

The Kremlin’s main target for destruction is the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. It gained independence from the Russian Orthodox Church in 2019. That split, said Mr. Putin, was a weapon of “mass destruction” against Russian identity. “Our spiritual unity has also been attacked,” he wrote. Ukraine is home to the world’s third-biggest Orthodox congregation, after Russia and Ethiopia.

In contrast, Ukraine’s multiple religions have discovered a new unity based on an appreciation for religious liberty and the rights of individual conscience. “Faith should unite, and not divide,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish.

“Our churches are now hand in hand,” Father Vasily Vyrozub of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Odesa told the Irish Times. “We are closer now than ever, despite our theological differences.”

This contrast in how Russia and Ukraine are using religion is playing out in several other countries with Christian Orthodox churches. Latvia, for example, has passed a law demanding that the Latvian Orthodox Church separate from the Moscow Patriarchate. In Moldova, the Orthodox faithful feel pressure to side with either the Russian church or an alternative, such as the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Even within the Russian Orthodox Church, a statement from nearly 300 priests opposed the church’s official endorsement of the war. The priests stated that only “forgiveness and mutual reconciliation” could bring peace between Russia and Ukraine.

The Ukraine war will be won by more than bullets and bullion. In a speech on Sept. 30, Mr. Putin claimed “there is nothing stronger than the determination of millions of people who, by their culture, religion, traditions, and language, consider themselves part of Russia.” Others, including inside Russia, see religion playing a healing role. Peace may be won in places of faith as much as on the battlefield.