Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Guards stand on the steps of the Supreme Court, June 30, 2023, as the court's latest term drew to a close in Washington. Fewer rulings this year involved 6-3 decisions by the court's conservative wing.

It is the first question that must be answered in every U.S. Supreme Court case: Does the court have jurisdiction to hear the case at all?

The question of standing, as it is called, loomed large over the just-concluded term in cases covering everything from immigration policy to student loans to Native adoption law.

Standing doctrine, per the U.S. Constitution, limits federal court jurisdiction to certain “cases” and “controversies.”

If this seems vague – well, not even the nine justices always agree, especially when it comes to cases brought by states against the White House. And it’s something that even the justices have criticized as easy to manipulate.

In 2007, for example, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a dissent that the special consideration for states was emblematic of “how utterly manipulable [standing doctrine is] if not taken seriously as a matter of judicial self-restraint.”

Last week, in her dissent in the student loan ruling, Justice Elena Kagan quoted that line back to him. “After today,” she wrote, “no one will have to go back 50 years for the classic case of the Court manipulating standing doctrine.”

While not as historic, or divisive, as the term before it – which included decisions overturning the constitutional right to abortion and expanding gun rights – the deeply conservative court still reshaped the law in significant ways this year. But this most recent term has shown that, in some cases, the high court is only willing to go so far. Some cases involving more radical arguments and theories failed. Notably, the court upheld a key provision of the Voting Rights Act and threw out a controversial legal theory that would have given state legislatures sole authority over how federal elections are run. Both decisions were hailed by election experts as strengthening democracy.

In other cases, the justices sought narrower rulings – rather than sweeping outcomes – and they often did so on procedural, jurisdictional grounds.

“The federal courts are not supposed to have jurisdiction over policy disputes that are just purely policy disputes,” says Carolyn Shapiro, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.

The Supreme Court, she adds – in this term and past terms – “has not been entirely consistent” on that point.

The return to restraint comes after last term’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade brought with it protests, death threats, and polls showing record low trust in the high court. It also comes after ethics scandals embroiling several justices have renewed calls for the high court to adopt a judicial code of ethics. But this term’s opinions themselves were – with several key exceptions, including overturning affirmative action and allowing creative businesses to deny service to LGBTQ+ Americans – less likely to rely on the raw power of the supermajority. Last term, there were 14 decisions split 6-3 on partisan lines. This term, there were five.

Jose Luis Magana/AP

People protest outside the Supreme Court in Washington on June 29, 2023, after the court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions.

The student loan case

In recent decades, the Supreme Court has typically taken a strict view of standing. Two years ago, for example, the court significantly narrowed the doctrine in a case concerning when a privacy violation causes sufficient harm to confer standing.

“Federal courts do not possess a roving commission to publicly opine on every legal question,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in that opinion.

There have always been exceptions, however. One decision in particular this term, involving President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, provoked a fiery standing debate.

Two cases challenging the program reached the court, one brought by individual borrowers and one brought by a group of Republican-led states. The court ruled unanimously that the individual borrowers, who hadn’t qualified for maximum relief, lacked standing. In the case brought by the states, Missouri argued that because an independent loan servicing agency it created would be financially harmed by the plan, the state itself was harmed.

While it was created by the Missouri government, the agency operates independently. It had the power to sue the Biden administration itself but chose not to – in fact, it declined to even file a brief in the case. Missouri had never before filed a suit on behalf of the agency, and any revenue loss the agency would suffer because of the loan relief program would not be passed on to the state. 

“Not even Missouri, and not even the majority, claims that [the agency’s] revenue loss gets passed through to the State,” wrote Justice Kagan in her dissent.

“A bedrock principle of standing law [is] that a plaintiff cannot ride on someone else’s injury. Missouri is doing just that,” she added. “That means the Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”

Chief Justice Roberts – the author of the 6-3 majority opinion and a justice with some of the court’s strictest views on standing – took umbrage at the criticism. The standing analysis was simple, he wrote. Because the agency suffered a concrete harm from the program (revenue loss) and because the state “created and controls” the agency, the state also suffered a concrete harm.

Several other standing decisions this term, however, came out against the interests of conservative plaintiffs. 

Most prominently, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Texas and Louisiana didn’t have standing to challenge Biden administration guidelines on immigration enforcement. Texas had argued that the guidelines prioritizing the arrest and removal of the most dangerous immigrants financially harmed the state. Accepting that argument would create a dangerous new standard, wrote Justice Kavanaugh in the majority opinion.

“The States have brought an extraordinarily unusual lawsuit,” he added. They “want the Federal Judiciary to order the [administration] to alter its arrest policy so that [it] arrests more noncitizens.”

“If the Court green-lighted this suit, we could anticipate complaints in future years about alleged Executive Branch under-enforcement of any similarly worded laws,” he continued. “We decline.”

In that sense, the term featured the return of an older Roberts court trend: deciding potentially sweeping cases on narrow grounds.

“This effort to postpone deciding certain questions, deciding certain cases narrowly, that’s something we haven’t really seen” for a few years, says Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

That isn’t to say that the current Supreme Court isn’t deeply conservative, but it does mean it seems unwilling “to change [the law] dramatically without a full sense of what that entails,” adds Professor Adler. “That leads then to some of the more, I wouldn’t say moderate, but more modest and narrow decisions.”

Andrew Harnik/AP/File

Lorie Smith, a Christian graphic artist and website designer from Colorado (right, in a Dec. 5, 2022, photo after her case was heard in Washington) won a Supreme Court case arguing that she should be allowed to refuse to serve same-sex couples.

Why standing matters

Since the standing doctrine is a procedural one, it may lack the glamour of meaty merits questions. But it’s arguable that no doctrine is more important to the court as an institution, and to the federal judiciary as a whole.

Standing jurisprudence informs what cases the courts can hear, which has ripple effects on the powers of Congress and the presidency. And that jurisprudence is determined exclusively by the judiciary itself. These case-by-case decisions also tend to be very fact-based and subjective.

“It gives lower courts, and particularly the Supreme Court, a lot of leeway to say, ‘We do want to hear this type of claim, so it doesn’t cross the line,’ or ‘We don’t want to hear this type of claim, so it does cross the line,’” says Scott Anderson, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on standing.

Even when the high court rejects a claim on standing grounds, it can detail how similar claims could be successful in the future. This term, Justice Kavanaugh – another proponent of a strict standing doctrine – took on that role.

In one notable decision, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law governing the adoption of Native American children, holding that the parties didn’t have standing to challenge the law’s constitutionality. But in a solo concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh outlined how litigants might be able to achieve standing to bring such a constitutional challenge.

In his majority opinion in the immigration case, he also outlined how states could challenge other federal immigration policies, including the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. And while a majority of the court upheld Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in what may have been the biggest surprise of the term, Justice Kavanaugh outlined how states could challenge that key section in future.

These kinds of opinions offer guidance not just for prospective litigants, but for lower federal courts as well. When the Supreme Court rejects a standing claim, it’s also telling lower courts to reject that standing claim, says Professor Adler.

“It’s a way of imposing restraint on the judiciary as a whole,” he adds. “The tighter the [high] court is on standing, the more control it has on when it reaches these [merits] questions.”

The justices could tighten standing doctrine even more next term. The court will hear a case asking if a woman can sue a hotel for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act if she had no plans to stay there.

But another looming challenge for the court, previewed in this past term, is the combination of a more conservative federal judiciary and targeted lawsuits from conservative litigants bringing forth a steady stream of unusual legal arguments.

The “extraordinarily unusual” suit advanced in the immigration case had been approved by a District Court judge in southern Texas. Missouri’s controversial standing claim in the student loan case had been rejected by a District Court judge but endorsed by a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.

And in perhaps the highest-profile standing case of the term, the court stayed a ruling from a federal judge in northern Texas that would have restricted access to a widely prescribed abortion pill. That case has yet to reach the court for oral arguments.

In some of the court’s more controversial rulings – such as striking down affirmative action and allowing a website designer to not serve LGBTQ+ clients – standing was not an issue, says Professor Shapiro. The court is very conservative, and it can move the law in conservative directions without transforming standing doctrine. But its commitment to a narrow view of standing is likely to be tested, regularly, in the coming years.

“We will continue to see some really radical arguments take hold in some of the lower courts,” predicts Professor Shapiro.

“The fact the Supreme Court has so far rejected some of them doesn’t mean that it doesn’t push the law to the right,” she adds. The court “will probably accept some of them at some point, and it will consistently move the Overton window to the right on what arguments are acceptable.”

Israel’s 48-hour incursion of hundreds of troops this week into the northern West Bank city of Jenin, which has emerged as a potent stronghold for Palestinian militant groups, left behind some telling images.

What they promised for the future was not security for anyone, but escalation and a deadly cycle of violence that in recent years had been alien to the once-stable West Bank and that evoked comparisons among some observers to Gaza.

They also highlighted the increasing irrelevance and ineffectiveness of a Palestinian Authority caught between growing support for armed groups at home and an intransigent far-right government in Israel.

Families are now returning to smashed homes and rubble-strewn streets left by receding Israeli forces after the largest Israeli military incursion into the West Bank in two decades. The raid displaced thousands of residents from the targeted refugee camp, with more than 140 injured.

At a funeral Tuesday for some of the dozen young militants killed in the battle, which involved Israeli drone strikes and ground forces, angry mourners chased away two senior Fatah and Palestinian Authority (PA) representatives who arrived to express their condolences.

Palestinian protests also erupted against the PA and its aging autocratic ruler Mahmoud Abbas over its inability to protect citizens from increased settler attacks and its alleged facilitating of Israeli military operations. 

Ammar Awad/Reuters

Palestinian women react to the aftermath of the Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp, July 5, 2023.

“We are talking about devastated families and households who are in need of more than just diapers and canned foods. We need to feel safe,” says Saja Bawaqneh, a 30-something lawyer whose family home in Jenin was damaged by Israeli forces for the second time in less than a year. “Over the past few years, we haven’t felt safe in our homes at all.”

And Israeli military officials admitted that despite its devastating scope, the large-scale operation had fundamentally changed little on the ground and was likely just a prelude for future military action.

Israel launched the long-anticipated raid after months of deadly militant attacks – many emanating from the Jenin region – and escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence that has claimed the lives of more than 160 Palestinians and 20 Israelis this year alone.

Declaring that Jenin was “no longer a safe haven” for militant activity, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted Wednesday at further West Bank military operations.

“This is just a first step. It’s not, by any means, the last action that we will take,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the conclusion of the operation.

A retaliatory car-ramming and stabbing attack on Tuesday by a Palestinian in Tel Aviv that injured seven, and the killing of an Israeli soldier by a Hamas gunman in the West Bank on Thursday, hit home for many that this week’s destruction in Jenin was a prelude to more confrontation and bloodshed, not less.

To fight another day

The focus of the Israeli operation was the Jenin Brigades, a militant network formed in 2021. Like the Lions’ Den in Nablus, it is a grouping of young men from a cross section of Palestinian factions and backgrounds united by their desire to raise arms against Israel.

According to one senior Israeli military officer, the intent of the operation was to dismantle the “terrorist activities and infrastructure” inside the 0.16-square-mile camp of 23,000 people, as attested by the myriad explosive devices and weapons caches Israel seized.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Another major aim was to “increase our freedom of operations into the camp,” the Israeli military official said. Heavily armored bulldozers tore up streets looking for buried improvised explosive devices lying in wait.

Yet Israeli officials admitted that most of the hundreds of armed militants estimated to be inside the Jenin camp simply dispersed at the launch of the operation.

Israel estimates that 13 armed combatants were killed in the two-day operation along with one Israeli soldier whom sources say was possibly killed by friendly fire. Palestinian health officials say Israeli forces killed 12 people, including four teenagers.

“In the short term [the operation] may change things a little – degrade the local capabilities of the militants … allow the [army] greater freedom of movement, so not every raid into Jenin will turn into ‘Black Hawk Down,’” says Amos Harel, defense analyst for Haaretz newspaper.

“But even the most optimistic officials and analysts admit [that the operation] doesn’t change things fundamentally and could trigger more revenge attacks in the West Bank, from Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon,” he adds.

Majdi Mohammed/AP

An Israeli military convoy passes through Jenin during a raid on the West Bank city's refugee camp, July 4, 2023.

The ability of the Jenin Brigades to disperse, regroup, and live to fight another day undermined Israel’s second and perhaps greater goal: “to dismantle the heroic image of Jenin camp” – as the Israeli officer said – in the minds of the Palestinian public as a bastion of resistance.  

Instead, the operation has cemented support for Jenin and its armed groups among Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza.

With PA forces unable to stop armed far-right Israeli settlers from marauding in Palestinian villages, residents are increasingly turning to these militant groups as the only actors defending Palestinian lands and homes – even as they remain wary of the prospect of a wider conflict and the proliferation of armed groups.

Political aims

Israeli analysts say the operation did more to further the political goals of the Israeli government: It allowed Prime Minister Netanyahu to appear tougher on security than the previous government, and it advanced the agenda of his far-right settler coalition partners, who wish to expand and secure their presence in the West Bank.

“The settlers ... want to exert their new influence on this government, and their ultimate aim is to destroy the Palestinian Authority,” says Mr. Harel. “An Israeli incursion like this, they know, will weaken it even further.”

Ammar Awad/Reuters

An Israeli police officer scuffles with Palestinians at a protest in Jerusalem over the Jenin raid, July 4, 2023.

Indeed, the ability of Jenin’s militants to withstand a major ground operation and drone strikes two weeks after they bogged down Israeli armored vehicles in the mazelike camp for several hours has cemented a Palestinian narrative of a David versus Goliath struggle. That narrative is winning support and plaudits for the armed groups even among Fatah officials and Ramallah politicians who advocate nonviolent means to statehood and the end of Israel’s occupation.

“This is a chance for us to raise our heads up high, even when we cannot openly support them with arms,” says Mohammed, a senior Fatah member in Ramallah.

Some of the estimated 4,000 civilians pushed from their homes by fighting are returning to destruction and deteriorating services in Jenin.  

Torn-up roads have hindered the access of ambulances, and electricity and water services have been disrupted throughout the refugee camp.

The closure of United Nations Relief and Works Agency health facilities and schools, ATMs, banks, and shops that honor U.N. food assistance vouchers has exacerbated the situation for thousands of residents who were already vulnerable and skirting the poverty line before the incursion.

The U.N. relief agency said it was working to support Palestinian authorities to restore basic services, reopen schools, and provide cash assistance.

Majdi Mohammed/AP

Palestinian residents of the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank flee their homes, July 4, 2023.

“Spirits are high”

Yet morale, even among families that lost homes, remains high.

Alaa Salah, a 20-something camp resident who was reached by phone and whose house was entirely destroyed, says that “the most important thing was the camp fought back.”

“My home is damaged, my brother and cousin are injured, and my mother is now living with our relatives, but our spirits are high. What matters is that the shabab [militants] survived and are safe,” he says from Jenin. “These men are real men; they protected us when no one could, not the PA or any other faction. [Palestinian factions] are all useless and it is now all in the hands of the resistance.”

Ms. Bawaqneh, the lawyer, whose father was killed by Israeli forces in a Jenin raid last year, said the operation has deepened a sense of insecurity across the West Bank.

Yet she says Jenin residents have taken heart in the fact the operation has “united” diverse Palestinian factions who offered moral support for the Jenin Brigades.

“United on the battleground, they are giving us a sense of hope that we are protected,” she says.

The PA this week said it broke off communication and security cooperation with Israel in protest over the raid, yet it has not lessened the view among Palestinians that it has facilitated such operations.

Despite Mr. Abbas’ insistence on negotiations as the only viable path out of the conflict, there is neither political will in Israel nor in the United States and the international community to restart talks, Palestinian analysts say. And that too is fueling support for resistance.

On the lush banks of the Amônia River, where Brazil meets Peru deep in the Amazon, the Ashaninka Indigenous community is quietly spending $3 million in reparations for illegal logging.

Traditional thatched roof homes are being rebuilt larger and sturdier, and villagers speed down the muddy river on canoes equipped with new motors.

Yet the most meaningful transformation is taking place under the surface, locals say, and began long before the reparation settlement was reached.

“Our dream is not the money. Our dream is protecting this,” says Moises Piyãko, a member of a family of village leaders, gesturing to the expanse he helped rebuild, covered with groves of plentiful fruit trees, grassy clearings, and reservoirs for fishing.

The Ashaninka of the Amônia River spent generations as manual laborers for outsiders who denigrated and at times prohibited their culture. Bouts of large-scale logging decimated close to a third of their forest in the 1980s. By 2020, the community received a formal apology and began receiving monetary compensation from one of the logging companies in a historic legal feat.

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Women and men gather on separate sides of an open-air home, in Apiwtxa village in the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Reserve, Brazil, May 27, 2023.

With land invasions still an active threat, the reparation money came with a feeling of cautious triumph. Villagers see it as a form of cultural justice, which will serve its purpose to the extent that it ensures the survival of their Ashaninka identity. Giving communities the agency to correct past wrongs on their own terms is a trend gaining steam in the world of reparational justice.

“We’ve used the money to have the freedom and the time to rebuild ourselves and reposition ourselves as a society, operating under our own conditions,” says Francisco Piyãko, the eldest brother of Moises.

“A lot of times reparations will fall short because they don’t respect the needs and priorities of the communities,” says Thomas Antkowiak, a professor at Seattle University School of Law. “But only that way are they going to maintain some sort of restoration that matters to them.” 

History of exploitation

Hunters and loggers began arriving to this area in the mid-1900s, launching what villagers remember as an era of shortage and hunger. White patrões, so-called bosses, exchanged goods for their labor instead of wages and discouraged them from wearing traditional clothing, holding cultural ceremonies, or organizing meetings among themselves.

In the 1970s, as they started fighting for their legal rights and land recognition, close to half the village left, scared by rumors they would starve if the settlers were kicked out. 

Meanwhile, logging companies saw a lucrative opening. Over the course of the 1980s, two companies cleared 25,000 acres of valuable cedar, mahogany, and cherry trees for sale in European furniture markets, using heavy machinery that decimated large swaths of the forest. The roar of chain saws drove wildlife away. Oil spills polluted nearby waters. 

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Wewito Piyãko points to a map showing the stretch of forest that was decimated by loggers in the 1980s, in Apiwtxa village in the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Reserve, Brazil, May 26, 2023.

The community opened a legal dispute against the loggers in 1996, four years after gaining its formal land rights. One of the companies, owned by the governor of the state at the time, offered the Ashaninka village three cattle ranches, a storefront in the closest city, and $100,000 to give up the case, remembers Moises Piyãko. They refused.

“We wanted an end to the exploitation,” he says. Even if it meant waiting decades for justice. 

That’s a common trend Indigenous communities face across Latin America, says Professor Antkowiak. Typically, “these cases just sit in the courts for years and years, and that has serious consequences for the communities themselves.” 

The Ashaninka people had no intention of waiting idly. They were deep in their own work of repairing their cultural identity, from the inside out.

The overarching goal was to re-create the self-sufficiency practiced by their ancestors. They hashed out a land and environment management plan, cataloged native seeds, planted over 15,000 mahogany and cedar trees, and set up agroforestry groves. They relocated their village along the river to better monitor potential invasions.

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Bags woven by Ashaninka community members hang on the wall of the cooperative alongside other crafts, in Apiwtxa village in the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Reserve, Brazil, May 27, 2023.

They turned to other sources of funding for conservation and land protection efforts, like the Brazilian National Development Bank and Conservation International. The Apiwtxa Association became their political arm, while a workers cooperative grew to represent the community economically. Today they sell local handiwork, crafts, and agricultural products across Brazil.

When the Supreme Court ruled in their favor and a settlement was reached, over two decades after they launched the case, the Ashaninka were ready. 

“We traded our bows and arrows for our minds, our capacity to communicate and touch hearts,” says Mr. Piyãko.

The final word 

In addition to a formal apology, the reparation consists of 6 million Brazilian reais ($1.2 million) earmarked for a human rights and environmental defense fund, and 14 million reais ($2.9 million) paid to the Apiwtxa Association, distributed every six months through 2025. The community is still in negotiations for reparations from a second logging company.

A council of two dozen villagers organizes the spending, with input from the whole community during regular assemblies where topics like education, grazing, fishing, hunting, and protecting the land from invasions are debated. The funds are used as needs arise, from improving infrastructure to financing travel for conferences on Indigenous and environmental issues.

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Dora Piyãko, president of the Apiwtxa cooperative, sits beside her brother, who is weaving a traditional headdress, in Apiwtxa village in the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Reserve, Brazil, May 26, 2023.

“We never make decisions individually. The community always has the final word,” says Dora Piyãko, president of the cooperative. The council decided against dividing the money into individual proportions, opting to invest collectively in the community’s future and in supporting other Indigenous peoples in the area.

Reparation funding will be used to build a center for Ashaninka education, so that future generations remain rooted in traditional knowledge, culture, and spirituality alongside the Western education they receive at school.

Gloria Silva lives across the river from the main village in a house recently equipped with electricity, thanks to reparation money. In addition to raising her three children, she makes woven bags, beaded earrings, and traditional kushma dresses, which she sells to the cooperative.

“Now we can store food,” she says, her youngest daughter’s arms wrapped around her neck. “Now I can work in the evening.” 

“Fight for what we are”

Scars of the past are healing. Today, children roam the peaceful village freely, and people of all ages gather on weekends at celebrations that end only when gourds scrape the bottom of communal batches of food and drink. 

The Ashaninka settlement is considered an exception. Many communities in similar situations are not taken seriously by legal systems, cannot access lawyers to take on their cases, or are granted sums of money that pale in comparison with losses. Yet the tide may be turning.

“This is a decision that will be taken into consideration for all other processes that deal with environmental damage and the defense of Indigenous peoples,” says Antônio Rodrigo Machado, the lawyer who represented the Ashaninka people during their reparations negotiations.

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Bianca Piyãko is 18 years old and one of the village’s future leaders, in Apiwtxa village in the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Reserve, Brazil, May 26, 2023.

In May, their case was used as precedent in another court battle denouncing environmental damage caused by a freeway on Indigenous territories in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. 

Bianca Piyãko sits cross-legged and quiet as a regular Saturday gathering winds down and women around her chat. As the night darkens, elders on this airy veranda pull out their flutes, each blowing a different note in the bittersweet harmony.

At age 18, Ms. Piyãko didn’t live through the years of land struggle and death threats, but feels the weight of that past on her shoulders. It will be up to her generation to navigate the village’s relationship to the outside world, deciding what to adopt – and what to reject.

“Out in the world, they think differently. They think about gain,” she says. “Here in the forest, we have just one objective: to fight for what we are. The root and the strength of our people is unity.”

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.

Editor’s note: a previous version of this story misstated the name of Seattle University School of Law.

AP

Senegal's President Macky Sall

For Africa’s elected leaders seeking to extend their hold on power, fiddling with constitutional limits has been one of the most dog-eared tricks in the political playbook. That trick just got a little harder. Earlier this week, Senegalese President Macky Sall announced that he would not circumvent his country’s laws to seek a third term in elections later this year. “I have a code of honor and a sense of historical responsibility that compel me,” he said in an address on July 3. “Senegal is more than me.”

Mr. Sall’s deference to a democratic norm comes amid some other bright turns for democracies worldwide. On June 22, Mexico’s highest court struck down reforms sought by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador that would have eroded the independence of the agency that oversees national elections and weakened its ability to hold politicians accountable for breaking election laws. Chile, meanwhile, is setting a standard for deliberative constitutional reform that has been shaped and checked by voters six times over the past 30 months.

Africa’s efforts to entrench democratic practices like rotation in office and peaceful transfer of power may get less notice than deserved. Nearly 40 countries have adopted presidential term limits. Those measures have been subject to almost constant meddling. Since 2000, according to the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, presidential mandates were removed or loosened at least 24 times in 18 countries. But they have been strengthened in at least 23 cases across 19 countries during the same period.

In an African Union declaration last year, members issued a declaration to “strongly condemn all forms of unconstitutional changes of government,” including “entrenching power of the incumbent in violation of the national democratic principles.” More than 75% of Africans support presidential term limits, according to Afrobarometer.

Senegal is now showing how democratic aspirations become principles. The country adopted term limits under a new constitution in 2001. That provision survived its first test in 2012, when voters rejected an attempt by then-President Abdoulaye Wade to seek a third term. Mr. Sall won – and now it is his turn to reaffirm the precedent his election set.

There were doubts in recent months that he would. At least 16 people died in street protests that turned violent last month in part over his refusal to confirm that he would not run again. The delay may have reflected more wisdom than dithering. As Mr. Sall noted, a broad sweep of mayors and members of parliament were pushing him to run again. At stake, observers say, is political control over Senegal’s lucrative impending oil and gas development deals.

At earlier points in his career, Mr. Sall showed little patience with corruption. His adherence to rules-based governance may now hold another point. “We must stand up for democracy and freedom, and uphold the best of our collective and African identity – an identity that is both rooted in our traditions and open to a world of innovation and opportunity,” the president wrote in an op-ed in Project Syndicate on Friday. For a continent hoping to reshape the global order, credibility abroad starts with honesty at home.