How Intelligent is Artificial Intelligence?

Thomas Klikauer

Image: the author & https://lexica.art.

When typing “Klikauer+AI” into an AI-based website called lexica.art, the picture shown above appeared. Yet, the man in the picture looks nothing like me. This failure might lead to the inevitable question of, how intelligent is artificial intelligence (AI)?

Apparently, the supposedly intelligent AI can’t even find a picture of me on the Internet – something that is actually saved, for example, on my very own website under my very own name.

If one looks, for example, at a rather common concept of what intelligence is – the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and the ability to perceive or infer information – AI doesn’t seem to do all that well.

Worse, for AI, intelligence can also be seen as the ability to retain newly learned information – not misinformation and disinformation and not made up stuff generated by ChatGPT.

Intelligence is knowledge applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context. From the standpoint of what intelligence actually is, AI seems to be miles away from actually being intelligent.

Given our understanding of intelligence, the allegedly so intelligent AI even failed to find a simple picture of me and to create a reasonably close approximation of me. Worse, the much famed ChatGPT – in another self-test – got four facts wrong about me. Rather than being intelligent, AI seems to just make stuff up.

Yet, despite this, the apostles of AI – including media capitalism – have a very serious incentive to diminish AI’s – known! – limitations. Hyped up by the media, AI has become big business in recent months.

Even thorough corporate media – and this is quite apart from ChatGPT failing the Turing-test and from other rather incapable AI image creation websites, AI is set to become increasingly dominant in our global online, and not so online, culture. To arrive where it is today, AI had to travel a long way.

While the term “artificial intelligence” may had been first used in 1894, the term “artificial intelligence” was turbo-charged in 1956. Today, AI continues to be popularized and most recently sensationalized. In reality, AI has no human-like intelligence. Its limited machine intelligence is radically different from what we know intelligence to be.

The prevailing myth of AI tells us that AI can – or will in the future – do almost everything. Yet, AI’s incredible success rests on narrow applications like board games It can also predict the next set of sleepwear purchased on Amazon. However, all this gets us not one step closer to general intelligence – an AI system that can do more than play games and sell things.

For the most part, today’s AI is rather successful in applying a simple and rather narrow version of something that might be called functional crypto-intelligence or machine intelligence. Quite apart from this, current AI still benefits from much faster computers compared to previous decades’ and, most importantly, from fast and cheap access – via the Internet – to lots and lots of data.

While AI is great for those kinds of things, overall, however, AI is making only incremental progress towards being more than that. In other words, today’s AI is picking low hanging fruits. Despite AI making quantitative progress – by showing some improvements – it does not however, make much qualitative progress towards human-like intelligence – including, for example, understanding irony, sarcasm, cynicism, inference, and intuition.

In other words, even if AI engineers could program “intuition” into an AI machine, it remains rather doubtful if AI ever can reach the level of human intelligence. In short, your AI-driven home robot will follow your command, get the orange juice out of the fridge, and bring it to me. But it might not “intuitively” check the expiry date of the juice. We do. And worse for AI, we do hundreds of such things every day without even thinking (much) about it.

To get out of the pickles from all the too obvious demonstration that artificial intelligence isn’t really that intelligent, AI likes to frame “intelligence” as simple and highly reductive problem solving.

Yet, the much-loved problem solving only gives us a narrow part of the human world. The great news for AI is that the problem-solving application of AI is, rather unsurprisingly, an area in which AI is very good at and does it extremely successful. The good news for AI continues when solving problems is sold as intelligence.

On the downswing and worse for AI is the fact that there seems to be an inverse correlation between an AI machine’s success in learning one thing, and its success in learning another thing.

In other words, an AI system that has learned how to play a winning game of Go won’t also learn how to play a winning game of chess. In machine intelligence, one does not lead to the other – sadly. AI remains, so far, trapped inside its own machine intelligence of simple puzzle solving.

Even more problematic for AI, a success in puzzle solving and the narrowness of AI programs are two sides of the same coin. This problématique alone casts very serious doubts on the currently much hyped-up prospect of an easy progress from today’s (narrow) AI to tomorrow’s human level AI. As well as towards next steps for AI: moving towards so-called super AI (ASI), whether speed-ASI, collective-ASI, and quality-ASI.

Quite apart from grandiose claims about ASI, it is, at least historically, almost self-evident that AI focused on engineering programs for narrow puzzle- and problem-solving applications. This is still the pre-dominant form of AI, today. Focusing on puzzle solving and winning games virtually assures global media hype.

Besides all the hype, even the so-called general AI (AGI) which will be (so the belief goes) non-narrow problem-solving intelligence, is actually something that we – as human beings – actually display every day. But true intelligence is not, never has been, and never will be a pre-programmed algorithm running in our heads.

Inside the current fanfare, super-AI is also called ultra-intelligent machine AI. This is the belief that AI can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any one person – however clever. Since the design of such an ultra-AI machine is an intellectual activity, an ultra-intelligent machine could then self-design even better and even more clever AI machines.

The apostles of AI think that this will unquestionably lead to what they have termed as intelligence explosion. They also imagine that this exploded intelligence would leave us behind. The propaganda behind all this is relatively obvious, so don’t dispute whether super-intelligence is coming – instead, get ready for it!

Yet, one of the key snags for AI remains this: adding more RAM to your MacBook does not make it actually more intelligent. At times, it even appears as if there is an untold assumption about an ever-increasing intelligence in AI. But there also seems to be a certain circularity. It looks like that it will take general intelligence to increase general intelligence.

In other words, AI without real intelligence just gets the wrong answers more quickly. This is where we are at, today. But this is also, according to MIT’s computer scientist and “one” of the Godfathers of AI – often actually called as “the” Godfather of AI – Marvin Minsky, where we should “NOT” be today. He declared in 1967,

within a generation, the problem of creating artificial intelligence will be substantially solved.

Minsky’s within a generation is considered to be within twenty to thirty years. Since 1967, two generations have passed (56 years). Contrary to Minsky’s statement, AI is still not substantially solved.

Instead of utterly unreachable and unachievable goals, the idée fixe that AI computers could be programmed with the knowledge of human beings, remains utterly quixotic. Actually, it shouldn’t deserve any serious discussion.

Remaining inside the fantasy world of AI, there are, of course Hollywood-style tales of fearsome and even apocalyptic AI. These are scary campfire horror yarns that do not reflect the reality of AI. At the other extreme are utopian FALC-like dreams about AI – solving global warming, ending world poverty, etc. Both are equally trivial and unwarranted.

Meanwhile, many of AI’s fairytales live and breathe from a shift from human wisdom and knowledge towards technology, computers, and algorithmic programming. Yet, this also marks a move toward what Greek philosopher Aristotle calls techne (the making of things) and a move away from what he called episteme, the knowledge of natural phenomena.

In other words, the focus on programming, algorithms, and AI moves us further away from sapientiae, the human wisdom relating to human values, morality, and society. As a consequence of this, it will make it ever more difficult to develop a meaningful idea of human uniqueness. In its finality, all this also means, that by placing techne at the center, it makes it possible to view a human being as something that can be built – even inside a computer or an algorithm.

All this very quickly leads to the idée fixe of a computational mind believing – wrongly – that the human mind is nothing more than an information processing system. Yet, paralleling the human mind with a computer is not scientific – it is a rather unhelpful illusion. And this is not even adding Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to the AI computational mix.

This leads to one of Heisenberg’s contemporaries, the Hungarian-British philosopher Michael Polanyi who unequivocally rejected the idea that machines could capture all of human intelligence. He also argued that machine intelligence would necessarily leave out the tacit constituents of human intelligence. These are elements of human thinking that cannot be precisely described by writing down symbols, i.e. coded computer programs and algorithms.

This explains why, for example, many human talents, skills, and crafts, like cooking, can’t be conquered by simply reading recipes. This applies even more so to the writing of literature. Just, imagine to code an AI computer program for writing a novel like, let’s say, James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Much of this suggests that the human mind on the one hand and machines and machine intelligence on the other hand have fundamental, very deep, and extremely serious dissimilarities. All this also means – by “inference” (something AI finds impossible to do) – that equating the human mind with AI machines is problematic. And this is apart from the fact that the human brain, which AI prefers to talk about, is not the same as the human mind.

All of this, almost inevitably, leads to an over-simplification and misunderstanding of what the human mind and what intelligence actually is. It renders that true (read: not puzzle solving) AI is unachievable. And this comes quite apart from the fact that the word “intelligence” in artificial intelligence is quite a misnomer. True human-like intelligence remains unachievable for current AI.

Honor Daniel Ellsberg by Abrogating the Espionage Act

Melvin A. Goodman

Photograph Source: Ben Schumin – CC BY-SA 2.0

Daniel Ellsberg’s courage and contributions should be honored by abrogating the Espionage Act of 1917, which was designed to stifle his example of dissent and whistleblowing.  Ellsberg’s resolve and tenacity were unusual.  He exposed the mendacity of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, giving the New York Times and the Washington Post  the Pentagon Papers, which they published.  The Times’ Abe Rosenthal and the Post’s Ben Bradlee did the right thing, but Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee William Fulbright and other senators had panicked and returned the papers to Ellsberg, refusing to make them public.

When he completed his work in exposing the immorality of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg focused on warning the American people about the dangers of nuclear weaponry and the militarization of national security policy.  His memoir, “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear Planner,” was far more consequential than the Pentagon Papers.  It warned about the dangers of nuclear proliferation and mutual assured destruction as well as the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization.

Ellsberg, the greatest whistleblower in U.S. history, was labeled America’s “most dangerous man” by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, which tells you a great deal about the two war criminals responsible for needless deaths in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Chile.  Ironically, Ellsberg had established himself as a national security expert in the 1950s, when he lectured to Professor Kissinger’s seminar at Harvard.  At the time, Ellsberg was a Cold War hawk and introduced the notion of irrational posturing in global affairs, which Nixon and Kissinger applied in policies toward Vietnam and Cambodia.  Ellsberg abandoned these ideas; Nixon and Kissinger held on to them much to our peril.

Under the Espionage Act of 1917, Ellsberg could have faced a faced a potential 115-year prison sentence. Fortunately, the Nixon administration’s illegal harassment of Ellsberg led a federal judge to dismiss all charges against him because of “gross prosecutorial misconduct” so severe as to “offend the sense of justice.”

The Obama administration invoked the Espionage Act more than any other administration in history.  Whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner were tried under the Act and received long prison sentences.  Julian Assange is facing charges under the Espionage Act, and former Times’ reporter James Risen was charged for doing his job. Former president Donald Trump is guilty of numerous acts of obstruction of justice and theft and retention of government property, but he shouldn’t be tried under the Espionage Act.

Jonathan Turley, a lawyer who defended Trump in his first impeachment trial, reminds us that the Espionage Act was passed to “crackdown on political dissidents,” particularly those who were opposed to World War One.  According to Turley, the Espionage Act is the “government’s favorite weapon” to use against its critics and is the “last refuge” of any administration that “lacks other means to punish targeted persons.”  The fact that Trump emphasized that he didn’t “want anybody looking through my boxes,” suggests that espionage itself was not one of his motives.  The charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice and to withhold and conceal documents in a federal investigation should suffice to find Trump guilty.

The predicate for the passing of the Espionage Act during WWI were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which were designed to curtail the excesses of an unrestrained press that opposed war against France.  The Acts allowed the president to deport aliens, and to permit their arrest and imprisonment during wartime in an effort to suppress dissent.  The Acts were clearly a violation of First Amendment principles regarding free press, speech, and assembly, with French and Irish immigrants the key targets.  President John Adams’ biographer, David McCullough, considered the legislation the “most reprehensible acts of his presidency.”

Two months after the United States entered WWI, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 to criminalize the mishandling of government records relating to national defense and any “attempts to incite insubordination or obstruct the recruitment of troops.”  Similar to the Alien and Sedition Acts, the primary purpose of the Espionage Act was to stifle criticism of the Wilson administration’s decision to enter the war.  The constitutionality of the law and the meaning of its language has remained controversial to this day, and could be a factor in any trial of Donald Trump.  Ironically, a critic of WWI, Eugene Debs, was imprisoned, but received nearly a million votes while in prison in his effort to become president in 1920.

The Sedition Act of 1918 was repealed in 1920, and between 1921 and 1923, Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge released all those convicted under the Sedition and Espionage Acts.  More recently, President Barack Obama commuted the long prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, and his attorney general, Eric Holder, referred to whistleblower Edward Snowden as a “public servant.”  CIA officer Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen were convicted under the Espionage Act for spying for the Kremlin, rare examples of the legitimate use of the legislation.

There have been 11 prosecutions of government officials under the Espionage Act, and 7 of them occurred during the Obama administration.  The prosecutions of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, CIA officer John Kiriakou, and Fox News reporter James Rosen were heavy-handed.  These cases demonstrated that the Espionage Act is, in fact, an extremely blunt instrument to use against dissidents and whistleblowers.  The Act, moreover, led to the Internal Security Act of 1950 that was passed over President Harry Truman’s veto in order to make mere retention of security documents a crime regardless of intent.

Trump’s lawyers presumably will mount a legal defense to the Espionage Act in addition to other judicial challenges.  The fact that the Espionage Act does not allow the defense to raise the issue of over-classification of documents or to explain their defendants’ reasons for their actions will be issues.  Congress should move quickly to abrogate the Espionage Act as a way to honor the memory of Dan Ellsberg.

UK’s slowing headline inflation rate does nothing to ease social crisis

Paul Bond

Asda Supermarket, Old Kent Road [Photo by Stacey Harris / CC BY-SA 2.0]

The much-vaunted slowing of the UK’s inflation rate only highlights the devastating economic and social crisis confronting the British working class.

In April, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) measure of inflation fell to 8.7 percent, its first dip below 10 percent since last August. The following month it fell again to 7.8 percent.

The Retail Price Index (RPI) gives a better idea of the effects of inflation, however, as it includes household costs otherwise excluded from consideration, like council tax and mortgage interest payments. In April, when the government was talking up a small fall in inflation, RPI still stood at 13.5 percent. Last month this had only fallen to 11.4 percent.

The slowing rate of inflation is largely attributable to decelerating energy price rises after last year’s sharp hike following the outbreak of war in Ukraine. Actual prices, it is important to note, are not dropping. As commentators explained, a lower rate of inflation does not mean prices are coming down, only that they are rising less quickly than they were.

Office for National Statistics figures show that wage increases are not keeping pace. Annual wage growth to February-April 2023 was 7.2 percent, versus 12.9 percent annual RPI inflation across the same months—fully 5.7 points behind.

Slightly lower headline rates, still forecast to be the highest of any leading economy this year, disguise much higher price rises for basic household goods—above all food. The Resolution Foundation thinktank warned last month in a report, Food for thought, that “The food price shock is about to overtake the energy price shock as the biggest threat to family finances.”

Although energy prices have risen faster, food makes up a larger proportion of a typical household’s consumption—13 versus five percent in 2019-20. The Resolution Foundation points to an even larger average increase in food costs since 2019-20 (£1,000) than energy (c.£900). It notes that this will be the case for the majority of households—56 percent (16 million).

In the 12 months to April this year, the price of food and non-alcoholic beverages rose a staggering 19.1 percent, its sharpest rise in 40 years. Of the G7 countries, only Germany showed a higher rate (21.2 percent) over the same period. Overall, food prices are up more than a quarter on pre-pandemic levels. Annual grocery inflation was running at 16.5 percent in June.

A BBC comparison of some foodstuffs by price between April 2022 and April 2023 showed the painful reality for households. The cost of sliced white bread had risen 28 percent, two pints of milk by 33 percent, and a dozen eggs now cost 37 percent more than 12 months previously. The price of 1kg of sugar has risen by 47 percent.

Analysis by Which? consumer magazine of April prices found that some meat, yoghurt and vegetables have doubled in price since last year.

This is having a devastating impact, with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation charity noting how its cost-of-living tracker found that 5.7 million low-income households are having to cut down or skip meals due to high food inflation.

ONS figures show people buying less but spending more due to food price increases. Sales volumes in April were three percent down on the previous year, while the amount spent by shoppers was up 4.7 percent.

The consequences are felt right across the working class. Headteachers in England have voiced concerns that if school dinner costs rise, children from poorer households that do not qualify for free meals will be priced out. Several told the i newspaper that they had been using school funds to keep the costs down to £2.20 a meal, but this has also become “very challenging” because of their own funding, which has been pared to the bone.

School caterers estimate that average meal prices will need to rise to between £2.70 and £3 in September, putting schools in an impossible position. Providing smaller, less substantial meals has already been suggested.

Independent Age, a charity supporting older people, has reported “more and more calls every day” from people who “really don’t have any idea how they’re going to pay their bills.” Pensioners have even told them they are turning their fridges off overnight to save money.

With the state pension rising in April by 10.1 percent, to £10,600—after a below-inflation rise of 3.1 percent the previous year—even a couple receiving the full pension would see the increase wiped out by rising costs.

The increase, for a full pension, amounted to an additional £972 a year (£19 a week), under conditions where average food bills had risen by £837 and average gas and electricity bills by £1,223. Many pensioners do not receive the full state pension amount, and those who claimed their state pension before April 2016 only benefited by an extra £14 a week, or £746 a year.

The government’s central concern is to ensure that there is no threat to operation of the profit system. Supermarkets turning massive profits have denied accusations that they are cashing in. Shevaun Haviland, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), said firms were “not profiteering” but dealing with pressures elsewhere in the supply line. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it has found no evidence “at this stage” of competition concerns.

The government has meekly suggested that supermarkets consider a voluntary price cap on specific items of their choice. Trade body the British Retail Consortium dismissed it out of hand, saying it would “not make a jot of difference to prices.” They called instead for cutting “the muddle of new regulation coming from government,” blaming rising prices on “the soaring cost of energy, transport, and labour.”

The Tory government feels compelled to make noises about price caps because it recognises the explosive social consequences of spiralling prices. In January Conservative government Prime Minister Rishi Sunak led a series of New Year pledges with a commitment to halving inflation this year. But forecasted sharp falls are already being revised upward.

Last week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) projected an average UK headline rate of 6.9 percent inflation for 2023, the highest in any leading economy. Core inflation, stripping out the most volatile price rises and indicating how “sticky” overall inflation is likely to be, has risen to a 31-year high of 6.8 percent. The International Monetary Fund, which had earlier downgraded its projection of a British recession, warned against “premature celebration”.

Given the crises affecting British and world capitalism, this is an understatement. According to analysis from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, post-Brexit trade barriers have cost an additional £6.95 billion in food prices—an extra cost of £250 per household in food bills alone.

Other factors are global in scope. The ONS pointed to supply disruptions caused by the Ukraine war, “labour shortages, which left some crops unharvested,” and bad weather spells which led to higher imported food prices. With the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine escalating, Covid-19 or new pandemics threatening and the effects of climate change becoming more intense, the drivers of inflation and economic crisis are not going away.

India-China border conflict enters fourth year as Modi visits Washington

Rohantha De Silva & Keith Jones

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will begin a four-day visit to the United States Wednesday.

That this visit is being billed by Washington as a “state” visit and that Modi—who was long barred entry to the United States because of his role in instigating and facilitating the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom—will be offered the rare honour of addressing a joint session of Congress underscores the importance that the US political and military establishment attaches to the Indo-US “global strategic partnership.”

Modi’s visit comes as the tense border stand-off between Indian and Chinese troops over their disputed 3,500 kilometre-long Himalayan border enters its fourth year.

Washington has worked throughout to inflame the dispute, with the aim of harnessing India still more tightly to its all-sided diplomatic, economic and military-strategic offensive against China. The Modi government, with the quasi-unanimous support of the Indian ruling class, has for its part used the border standoff to whip up popular hostility to Beijing and justify a vast expansion of bilateral, trilateral and quadrilateral military-security ties with the US, and its principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia.

Despite 18 rounds of de-escalation talks over the past three years among corps commanders and higher level diplomatic engagements, including at the ministerial and national security advisor level, both sides continue to have tens of thousands of troops, tanks, and warplanes forward deployed against each other on some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain.

In a development that attests to both how fraught the standoff is and Washington’s growing involvement, India has boasted that it repelled a Chinese troop incursion last December with the help of “real-time” US-provided intelligence.

The current standoff began in May 2020, when People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and Indian troops clashed at multiple places over the location of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between Chinese-held Aksai Chin and Indian-held Ladakh in the western Himalayas. The following month it spiraled into the most serious conflict between Asia’s two most populous countries since the 1962 Sino-Indian border war. In the midst of implementing what was supposed to be a staged de-escalation process, Indian and Chinese soldiers fought each other with rocks and clubs for several hours on the night of June 15, 2020 on a narrow ridge in the Galwan Valley. At least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers died in the encounter.

Two-and-a-half months later, several thousand Indian troops captured several nearby Galwan Valley hilltops unopposed in a risky nighttime maneuver that Indian officials later conceded could well have resulted in a direct clash with Chinese troops and the outbreak of all-out war. Soon thereafter in September 2020, shots were fired along the LAC for the first time since 1975.

Over the past three years, the disputed border has become heavily fortified with both India and China carrying out crash military infrastructure-building drives. New fortifications, airstrips, roads, tunnels, bridges, and rail links to swiftly move troops and supplies are being continuously developed. To fund these projects, the acquisition of new fighter jets, warships, and drones, and the expansion of India’s nuclear triad, New Delhi increased it military spending by 13 percent to 5.94 trillion rupees ($72.6 billion) in the last budget.

Increased military-strategic cooperation will be at the centre of Modi’s talks with Biden, as will be removing what Washington and Wall Street perceive to be barriers to developing India as a rival global production-chain hub to China.

In preparation for Modi’s visit, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Biden’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, made separate visits to New Delhi this month.

Washington has long worked to increase arms sales to India, with the double aim of boosting the US armaments industry and making India dependent on US arms and technology. With the outbreak of the US-NATO instigated war on Russia, Washington has become even more intent on diminishing and ultimately severing the longstanding strategic ties between New Delhi and Moscow.

With that in view, US officials have been talking up the possibility that this week’s Biden-Modi summit will see the announcement of “next level” joint military production and technology transfer agreements. During his June 4-5 visit, Defense Secretary Austin and his Indian counterpart, Rajnath Singh, reportedly agreed to a “new roadmap” for US-India defense industrial collaboration that will expedite co-production and technological cooperation in fields like air combat and ground mobility systems, ammunition, and the undersea domain.

Anxious to show its readiness to further expand its US arms purchases, the Indian government announced last week that it has approved the acquisition of 31 American-made MQ-9B drones at a cost of more than $3 billion.

Since the turn of the century, US imperialism, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, has been pursuing a military-strategic alliance with India as a key element in its plans to counter and thwart China’s “rise.” But as Washington has become ever more perturbed and agitated by China’s economic growth and expanding influence, leading to it publicly identifying Beijing as its principal strategic adversary, this has grown ever more reckless.

In a marked contrast with the position that it took in 2017 when Chinese and Indian troops faced off for ten weeks on the Doklam Plateau (territory claimed by both China and Bhutan), Washington abandoned any posture of neutrality at the very outset of the current Sino-Indian border conflict. It has routinely labelled China the “aggressor” and tied the ongoing Himalayan border dispute to the conflicts it has incited between China and its neighbours in the South China Sea.

Just weeks before the US reportedly provided India with “actionable” real-time satellite intelligence enabling it to repel an alleged Chinese PLA incursion, Indian and US troops held training exercises in mountain warfare less than a 100 kilometres from the contested Sino-Indian border.

The US has also greenlighted Indian “surgical strikes” on nuclear-armed Pakistan and supported the Modi government’s constitutional coup in Indian-held Kashmir that transformed India’s lone Muslim-majority and legally semi-autonomous state into a central government-controlled Union territory.

At least since 2006, when the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government negotiated the “global strategic partnership” agreement with the George W. Bush administration, the Indian bourgeoisie has made closer relations with US imperialism the cornerstone of its foreign policy and geopolitical strategy.

However, under the Modi-led far-right BJP government that came to power in 2014 and especially over the past three years India has dramatically accelerated its integration into the US military-strategic offensive against China, transforming India into a veritable frontline state in Washington’s war preparations.

While the border standoff has served as the pretext, this development has been driven by the immense socio-economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the ruinous profits-before-lives response pursued by capitalist governments everywhere, and by the ensuing intensification of global geopolitical conflict.

The Modi government’s COVID “economic recovery” program announced in May 2020 combined the embrace of a “herd immunity,” let-the-virus-rip speedy end to pandemic mitigation measures with a doubling down on the two polices that have been at the centre of the Indian bourgeoisie’s class strategy for the past three decades: pro-investor “reform” and enhanced ties with Washington.

Toward that end, New Delhi signed the last of the three agreements the Pentagon views as “foundational” for joint operations with foreign militaries in October 2020; welcomed Biden’s decision to dramatically expand the US-India-Japan-Australia Quad quasi-military alliance, including by instituting regular heads of government Quad summits; transformed the annual Malabar naval exercise into a Quad event in all but name; and signed bilateral logistics agreements with Japan and Australia, allowing for mutual use of each others’ military bases for resupply and repair.    

India is central to US war plans against China. Its size and location give it the potential to control navigation routes in the Indian Ocean while also threatening the “soft underbelly” of China in Tibet. Its nuclear-armed military has the second largest number of active duty troops in the world and is rapidly developing a blue-water navy. 

India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which lie at the eastern entrance to the Malacca Strait, are of strategic value with the world’s busiest shipping lanes close at hand, including those that bring oil to China and East Asia. The islands are perfectly situated to keep tabs on traffic through the Malacca Strait, which is a crucial “choke point” that could be used to cut off vital supplies and exports in a conflict with China.

A key element in India’s increased strategic relations with the US is economic. Despite the BJP government’s boasts about India’s “world-beating growth,” much of its infrastructure—as exemplified by the recent train disaster in Odisha—is dilapidated. By most measures, including per capita GNP, the country remains impoverished.

The Indian bourgeoisie is desperate to take advantage of the geopolitically-driven pullback of Western-based firms from China to transform India into a rival production chain hub, so as to increase its wealth and realize its great-power ambitions. But it also fears that it will otherwise reap the whirlwind of working-class anger over mass joblessness and poverty.

In its pandemic “recovery” strategy, the Modi government announced the ambition that India become a major arms exporter. It hopes to achieve this goal by developing India’s autonomous weapons production capability, but also by significantly expanding India’s role as a US weapons-manufacturing subcontractor.

In its push to further expand military-security ties with the US and its labeling of China rather than Pakistan as India’s principal strategic rival, the Modi government enjoys the overwhelming support of the Indian political establishment and capitalist elite. Insofar as the Congress Party and its leader Rahul Gandhi criticize Modi’s foreign policy, it is for being “too soft” on China.

For both strategic and economic reasons, the Modi government has thus far resisted US-NATO pressure that it label Moscow the “aggressor” in the war in Ukraine and impose economic sanctions against Russia. But this has everything to do with securing the predatory interests of the Indian ruling class.

It has provided pivotal support to Washington in its war drive against China, and to mollify Washington over its Ukraine war stance it is becoming still more accommodating to the Biden administration’s demands it integrate itself still more fully into the US-led campaign against China. And it is doing so, as that campaign reaches a new intensity, with the US repudiating the “one-China” policy in all but name, and as Washington demonstrates by its reckless and relentless escalation of the conflict over Ukraine that it is willing to risk nuclear and world war in pursuit of its mercenary strategic objectives.

India’s confrontational stance, backed up and encouraged by the US, is investing the localized, relatively minor Sino-Indian border conflict with the massive explosive charge arising from the frenzied struggle among the great powers for profits, resources and strategic advantage amid an imperialist drive to repartition the world.

Media outlets claim Iran-US close to a temporary “understanding”

Jean Shaoul

US President Joe Biden with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Under Biden, the US has continued to work closely with Israel to forge a broader anti-Iran military alliance. [AP Photo/AP Photo/Debbie Hill]

The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and various outlets in the Middle East have carried reports in recent days of direct talks between the US and Iran, including meetings in Oman, over a potential, temporary nuclear agreement, dubbed an “understanding.”

The details of what would be an “informal,” unwritten agreement, insofar as they have been revealed, indicate its very limited and fragile nature in a region destabilized by decades of imperialist-stoked conflicts. Its aim is to drive a wedge between Tehran and Moscow as the US and NATO prepare a drastic military escalation in their war against Russia over Ukraine.

Iran would pledge not to enrich uranium beyond its current level of 60 percent purity, cooperate with nuclear inspectors from the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), stop militias allied with Tehran from attacking US contractors in Iraq and Syria, refrain from supplying ballistic missiles to Russia and release three American-Iranian prisoners held in the Islamic Republic whom Washington says have been wrongfully detained.

For its part, the US would promise not to tighten the economic sanctions that have choked Iran’s economy, not to seize oil-bearing foreign tankers that it claims are carrying Iranian oil and not to pursue punitive resolutions against Tehran at the United Nations or at the IAEA for its nuclear activities. Washington would also unfreeze $20 billion in Iranian assets held in foreign banks, whose use would be limited to US-approved third-party vendors for food and medicine for Iranian citizens.

In an indication of what might follow, the Biden administration issued a waiver last week allowing Iraq to pay €2.5 (equivalent to $2.76 billion) for Iranian electricity and gas imports and make remittances to some of Iran’s creditors.

While Iran, three senior Israeli officials and a US official have acknowledged the talks mediated by Oman, the White House has denied that the discussions were aimed at securing an interim agreement, in part at least because a formal agreement would require the approval of the US Congress which is opposed to such a deal.

The Biden administration’s objective in pursuing such a deal is to disrupt the growing cooperation between Tehran and Moscow. This cooperation cuts across Washington’s geostrategic interests and eases the growing tensions in the region, amid an escalating covert aerial and maritime war between the US, and its attack dog in Tel Aviv, and Iran, that has threatened to erupt into open war alongside the war in Ukraine.

A Western official told Reuters that the aim of the deal between the US and Iran is to stop Israel from attacking Iran, because “If [the] Iranians miscalculate, the potential for a strong Israeli response is something that we want to avoid.”

During the 2020 election campaign, Biden pledged if elected to restart negotiations regarding the 2015 Iran nuclear accord. The Trump administration had unilaterally abandoned it in 2018, despite Tehran’s full compliance with the agreement, and launched an all-out economic war against Iran, including threatening retaliatory measures against any country that broke its illegal sanctions. Biden had hoped to use the resumption of the deal as a bait to detach Iran from Russia and China and, with the outbreak of the US-NATO instigated war with Russia, to open up new energy supplies for Europe.

Under President Ebraham Raisi, who hails from the conservative faction within Iran’s clergy-led bourgeois nationalist regime that had opposed the 2015 deal, Tehran had sought to take advantage of the Russia-Ukraine war and western sanctions on Russia to stress Iran’s importance to both Russia and China, while keeping open the option of an agreement with the US. Desperate to get rid of the ever-tightening sanctions that had wrecked its economy, Tehran largely withdrew its preconditions for a deal, including that the US withdraw its designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation.

But Washington kept attaching new conditions. Then, angered by Iran’s provision of drones, artillery and tank rounds to Moscow—materiel Tehran said it had provided prior to February 2022—in return for Russia’s offer to increase cooperation on missiles and air defence, Washington imposed further sanctions against Iran. It also prevailed on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to criticize and bully Iran over its nuclear programme and by the beginning of September 2022 outright abandoned the talks.

While Israel has long been known to have an undeclared stock of nuclear weapons, Tehran has always maintained its nuclear programme is solely for civilian purposes. All the major powers, the IAEA and the CIA have admitted that there has been no evidence to contradict its claim, testifying to the fact that the nuclear issue is nothing but a smokescreen for Washington’s hostility and aggression towards Iran.

At the same time, Washington has brokered an anti-Iran alliance of the Gulf states and Israel and greenlit Tel Aviv’s aggressive air strikes against targets linked to Iran and its regional allies in Syria. At least some of the Israeli attacks have been carried out with support from the US base in al-Tanf, which is on Syrian opposition-held territory close to the border with Jordan and Iraq.

The imperialist powers’ brutal sanctions regime has caused Iran’s oil exports to plummet, slashing the country’s most important source of income and devastating its economy. Earlier this year, the Iranian currency fell to its lowest-ever level against the dollar, before recovering slightly following the announcement of the Saudi-Iran rapprochement brokered by China in March.

But with inflation officially running at around 50 percent and food inflation at 71 percent, extreme poverty is affecting ever wider layers, officially put at just over 30 percent of Iran’s 87 million population in 2022.

Protests broke out last September, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the clerical regime’s morality police. Fueled by popular anger over the terrible social and economic situation in the country, they rapidly spiraled into mass demonstrations that lasted for months and were suppressed with mass arrests, lethal force and the execution of at least seven protesters. On May 9, a spokesman for the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said that Iran had executed 209 people so far this year, describing its record as “abominable.”

As would be expected, the Western powers, led by the US, cynically sought to exploit the protests for their own reactionary ends, hoping to leverage the fissures within the Iranian bourgeoisie and even bring about “regime change.” In a development that underscores the predatory aims that lie behind all the “human rights” propaganda, the western media touted various extreme right-wing exiles, including “Crown Prince” Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah whose blood-soaked regime was toppled by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, as the voices of a “post-Islamic” Iran.

The social crisis, manifest in the ongoing protests by Iran’s retirees who have seen the value of their pensions disappear and sporadic strikes by teachers and industrial workers, has forced the corrupt clerical regime back to the negotiating table. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, said he could endorse an agreement with the West if Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was kept intact, while maintaining cooperation with the IAEA.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made contradictory remarks about the potential agreement as he seeks to fend off criticism from both his far-right coalition partners and the opposition.

He told his cabinet that he was opposed to any interim agreement between the US and Iran, saying that it would not prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. Speaking on television, Netanyahu insisted, “Our position is clear. No agreement with Iran would obligate Israel, which will do everything required to defend itself.” He added, “Our opposition to the deal—a return to the original (2015) deal—is working, I think. But there are still differences in outlook, and we do not hide these, regarding smaller agreements too. We have been stating our position clearly, both in closed and open sessions.”

Netanyahu has sought to downplay the negotiations as a “mini-agreement, not an agreement,” reportedly telling a meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, “What’s on the agenda at the moment between Washington and Tehran is not a nuclear deal, it’s a mini-deal,” adding, “We will be able to handle it.”

According to Ha’aretz, a senior Israeli official said that the US had been updating Israel on the emerging understandings and that Jerusalem was not trying to foil the talks, but instead would forward its objections. “There is an open and continuous dialogue with the Americans,” the official said, adding that Israel had not been “surprised” by the latest reports on an emerging “understanding.”

Last Thursday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant met US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on the sidelines of the NATO defence ministers meeting in Brussels to discuss their expanding cooperation against Iran. Gallant raised the importance for Israel that an interim deal includes a commitment from Iran to end its production of both ballistic missiles and attack drones.

Last week, the Eurasian Times reported that the US had dispatched its much-vaunted F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets to the Middle East as part of an open show of force against Russia, that along with Iran has defended the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. A CENTCOM press release noted, “While in the CENTCOM area, the 94th Fighter Squadron will integrate with coalition forces on the ground and in the air.” It comes after CENTCOM has issued multiple warnings over the last months claiming that Russian warplanes often engage in dangerous engagements with US jets and fly sorties over US bases such as the al-Tanf, collecting vital intelligence.

This follows a two-week exercise in Saudi Arabia at the beginning of June as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met regional leaders in Riyadh. It included fighter jets from the US, several Arab countries and Israel aimed at developing air and missile defence cooperation against Iran.

These developments, coming in the midst of a dramatic escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia that cannot but impact the balance of power in the Middle East, underscore that whatever the immediate fate of the potential US-Iran “understanding” the region remains riven with fault lines, and is increasingly being sucked into the maelstrom of an expanding imperialist drive to repartition the world.

Australian Senate inquiry highlights worsening problem of children “refusing” to attend school

Erika Zimmer

The Australian federal Senate has for several months held an inquiry, “The national trend of school refusal and related matters,” with the findings to be published later this month. Submissions and testimonies provided to the inquiry have shed light on yet another serious problem that has emerged within the crisis-stricken public education system—the inability or unwillingness of large numbers of children to regularly attend school.

Those Who Disappear: the Australian education problem nobody wants to talk about [Photo: University of Melbourne]

The exact scale of school avoidance is unknown, as no national standardised data is kept. One 2019 report, “Those Who Disappear: the Australian education problem nobody wants to talk about,” authored by University of Melbourne researchers, found: “Conservative estimates are that at least 50,000 children and young people of school age have detached from any educational program or institution, across the country at any given time.”

Other statistics suggest this number may just be the tip of an emerging iceberg.

Megan Gilmore, the chief executive of the Missing School organisation, which works to raising awareness of the educational issues facing children who miss school because of critical or chronic illness, spoke to the Senate inquiry panel. She cited another study that estimated that 1.2 million students across the country—that is, a quarter of the estimated 4 million children enrolled in Australian schools—“may be in a well-being, medical or disability crisis serious enough to affect their attendance and educational outcomes.”

A 2017 study by the Grattan Institute reported that a staggering 40 percent of Australian students were disengaged from learning and falling two years behind their peers.

Submissions to the Senate inquiry pointed to the complex and diverse reasons for school avoidance, such as bullying, safety, and experience with disabilities and mental health issues including post-traumatic stress disorder and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Importantly, testimonies also raised the impacts of an increasingly narrow school curriculum and the pressure to attain high academic scores.

A parent Facebook group, “School Can’t,” founded in 2012, changed its name from “School Refusal Australia” because the term refusal implied kids were simply being obstinate. “But it goes a lot deeper than that,” Louise Rogers, an administrator of the group, explained. “Children are experiencing distress and they don’t know what to do with it.”

Professor Kitty te Riele from the Australian Association for Flexible and Inclusive Education commented, “It’s essential that schools operate in ways that fit kids rather than expecting kids to fit in with them. Specialist schools can provide a possible solution but cost and location are prohibitive for most families.”

While school avoidance occurs across all socio-economic groups, the public system is the least able to meet the needs of its students. The submission from the Australian Secondary Principals Association stated, “government schools are not funded at a level which matches the mental, social and well-being needs of their students.”

An empty Australian school class room. [Photo: University of Melbourne]

The decades-long cutbacks to funding government schools are bipartisan Labor and Liberal Party policy. Between 2009 and 2018, total income to private schools rose by 16.9 per cent but by just 2.1 per cent for public schools. The preferential funding for private schools has continued with the Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Its latest budget cut real spending for public schools while continuing the resource advantage for private and Catholic schools.

Other submissions to the Senate inquiry pointed out that only one-third of children with mental illness receive professional help at school. Only 4 percent of primary schools in Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, have a school counsellor on site daily. Only half of all children aged 4-11 years who have a mental illness receive any form of treatment. Nationally, one counsellor is funded per 800 to 900 students.

Chronic underfunding in government schools has led to a rise in private school enrolments and concentrations of disadvantage in the public system. Of all public school enrolments, 46 percent of students are classed as either disadvantaged, low socioeconomic background, indigenous, disabled or living in a remote area. The equivalent proportion in private schools is just 20 percent.

Inquiry submissions noted the inflexibility and narrowness of the curriculum. The introduction of the high-stakes National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests in 2009 by the previous Labor government has led to public schools becoming testing factories, increasing stress levels for students, parents and teachers alike.

Dianne Giblin, CEO of the Australian Council of State Schools Organisation told the Senate, “Some of our kids, particularly our ASD and autistic kids are very creative… very artistic and very musical… (but) we tend to worry about their literacy and numeracy.”

Professor Jim Watterston , co-author of the “Those Who Disappear: The Australian education problem nobody wants to talk about,” pointed to the disincentives for schools to accept high needs students. He noted that they “often become collateral damage in the quest for higher academic performance and enhanced reputation.” Watterston cited one school that had attempted to re-engage students but had its government funding reduced because the school’s literacy and numeracy test results were not reaching requirements.

Several submissions and testimonies noted the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple studies have detailed the rise in mental health issues among young people since 2020.

Missing School’s Mary Gilmore told the Senate about the experience of one child: “Owen is a student in year 9 with ASD and anxiety who, after COVID, was too anxious to go to school, missing over a year. His self-esteem plummeted, his anxiety from missing classes grew; and he stopped eating enough, lost muscle tone and eventually could no longer leave home at all. Owen is now non-verbal.”

Powerful sections of the ruling elite have sought to exploit the youth mental health crisis to rail against lockdowns and other necessary public health restrictions. The real issue is that big business and finance capital want to ensure no further measures that impinge on the generation of profit—temporary school closures have been denounced by corporate and media figures because they necessarily involved the removal of children’s parents from their workplaces. Last year, the “Shergold Review,” which was promoted by the press, insisted that schools must remain open in any future pandemic.

The issue is not simply lockdowns, as is asserted by the establishment. Instead, it is the impact of a pandemic, for which the governments had not prepared, on top of the systematic defunding of public education and healthcare over decades. To the extent that issues emerged with online learning, it was yet another symptom of this assault on public education, together with the consequences of rampant social inequality.

The political establishment’s expressed concern for young people’s wellbeing amounts to nothing but hot air. Nowhere is any consideration made of the terrible mental health consequences that would have accompanied unchecked COVID infections in 2020, including through countless children being orphaned as a consequence of pre-vaccine mass infection. Likewise there has been no consideration of how proper public resourcing for online psychological services and related supports could have minimised the challenges experienced by young people during lockdown periods.

It can be safely anticipated that when the Senate report on school refusal is published on June 21, the Labor, Liberal and Green parliamentarians on the panel will not include any investigation of the crisis of the public education system nor properly address the shortfall of psychologists and other support services. The ruling elite is responsible for the disaster in the public education system that has fueled the phenomenon of “school can’t,” and it will not implement measures leading to its solution.

The destruction of an independent judiciary in Ukraine

Maxim Goldarb

An independent judiciary is one of the fundamental features and principles of bourgeois democracy. As far back as in the 18th century, Charles Montesquieu clearly outlined the division of state branches of power into three: legislative, executive and judicial, and argued each of them should be independent of the others.

In turn, any regime that tries to become dictatorial, first of all makes efforts to destroy the independence of the judiciary.

Over the past 10 years, the judicial system of Ukraine has undergone four cardinal reforms, countless changes, and judges have undergone endless attestations and recertifications, dismissals, rotations and even persecution. The attempts of the authorities to destroy the remnants of judicial independence and completely subjugate the judiciary have reached their apogee during the presidency of Volodymyr Zelensky.

Back in 2021, Zelensky tried to take control of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (CCU), a judicial body that evaluates the constitutionality of decisions of the president and parliament. In 2020, the Constitutional Court declared the judicial reform which was initiated by Zelensky and subsequently adopted by the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) to be partially unconstitutional. The CCU also declared several articles of the Law “On the Prevention of Corruption” unconstitutional. All this provoked anger on the part of Zelensky and threats from his office against the judges of the Constitutional Court.

The president does not have the authority to dismiss judges of the Constitutional Court. They are supposed to be independent, and decisions on early termination of the powers of judges are taken only by the Constitutional Court itself, in a few cases expressly stipulated in the Constitution.

However, in order to remove judges not under his control from the court, the president issued a decree in March 2021 by which he tried to dismiss the head of the Constitutional Court Alexander Tupitsky and judge Alexander Kasminin. At the same time, Zelensky issued a decree canceling the presidential decrees from 2013, by which these judges, in accordance with the Constitution, were appointed judges of the Constitutional Court. This criminally exceeded his powers and grossly violated the law.

US President Joe Biden and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev. [Photo: @POTUS Twitter]

The illegality of such actions by Zelensky was so obvious and blatant that the Supreme Court recognized them as illegal and canceled the relevant decrees.

In retaliation for this, on May 27, 2022, at the request of the prosecutors of the Office of the Prosecutor General, the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Tupitsky, was put on the international wanted list on charges of—attention!—a supposedly illegal departure from Ukraine in March 2022, although there is no legal basis whatsoever for such a charge. 

The very wording of the groundless accusations against the head of the Constitutional Court testifies to the obvious involvement of the authorities in this case of illegal persecution of the judge. Clearly, the Zelensky government sought to create a precedent to intimidate any other Ukrainian judge who is trying to go against the president. 

The work of the Constitutional Court was, in fact, blocked in 2022. And no one, neither the citizens of Ukraine nor the subjects of constitutional appeal, can actually use their right to apply to the Constitutional Court to check the constitutionality of presidential decrees and parliamentary laws.

In an even more extreme case, the authorities attacked the District Administrative Court of Kiev (OASK), whose judges opposed acting as servants of the president’s office. The OASK was the court responsible for considering the legality of acts of the highest officials of the state, including the president.

Thus, the District Administrative Court at one time canceled the decision to increase electricity tariffs; declared it illegal to increase the price of gas for the population; canceled the decision to rename Moskovsky Prospect and General Vatutin Avenue in Kiev into Stepan Bandera Avenue and Roman Shukhevych Avenue, respectively, in honor of the leaders of Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis; designated the symbols of the SS “Galicia” division as Nazi symbols; and made many other decisions objectionable to the authorities.

Then, on December 13, 2022, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine voted for bills No. 5369, developed by the office of the president, on the liquidation of the Kiev District Administrative Court, and No. 5370, on the formation of the Kiev City District Administrative Court instead. In this way, the president and parliament simply eliminated an independent court.

The Kiev City District Administrative Court, created by the new law, has not yet begun its work. As a result, citizens are effectively denied the opportunity to appeal against decisions of the president and other higher authorities that restrict their rights.

Moreover, two key bodies that make decisions on the appointment of judges are not working at all any more. In particular, the High Qualifications Commission of Judges (HQJC), due to changes in legislation adopted in November 2019, had not been working for 26 months by February 24, 2022.

In addition, a very important constitutional body, the High Council of Justice (HJC), was paralyzed, because 10 of its members all resigned on February 22, 2022, two days before the beginning of the war. About 60 state functions, which they collectively carried out, were stopped. The HJC is the body responsible for the appointment of judges and may punish and dismiss judges. Almost the entire judicial system is in the hands of this body.

The reason for the collective resignation of 10 members from the High Council of Justice was the creation by the Zelensky government of the so-called Ethics Council. This was supposedly designed to establish the compliance of a candidate for the position of a member of the High Council of Justice with “the criteria of professional ethics.” But half of this Ethical Council consists of foreign citizens from Western countries. This was openly demanded by the authorities of the United States and other Western countries in a clear effort to control the judicial system of Ukraine through their representatives in the Ethics Council.

The High Council of Justice quite rightly insisted that the powers of the Ethics Council have no constitutional basis. Moreover, according to the Constitution, citizens of other countries generally do not have the right to participate in the formation of public authorities in Ukraine.

Since the beginning of the war, the authorities, hiding behind the concept of “military secrets,” also began to actively close access to citizens to the register of court decisions. On February 24, 2022, the State Judicial Administration, the body responsible for the operation of the register and the reflection of court decisions in it, completely closed access to the register. It was resumed in June 2022, but human rights activists found that almost all criminal convictions over the past three years have disappeared from public access. Thus, for example, in the Kharkiv region, only 30 sentences for 2022 remained in the court register, and only 19 for the whole of 2021. If you believe the court register, then for the whole of 2020, all the courts of the Kharkiv region (with a population of more than 2 million people) issued only four verdicts, which is clearly impossible.

On December 21, 2022, human rights organizations filed an open appeal with the State Judicial Administration (SCA), in which they demanded it stop the practice of restricting access to documents in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions, to restore access to the adopted court decisions and to ensure the timely submission of procedural documents to the register.

The SCA did not have the authority to seize open-access court decisions just because they had data on the location of legal entities—public authorities, as well as critical infrastructure. This is a direct violation of the Law of Ukraine “On Access to Court Decisions.” The Unified State Register of Court Decisions is an important source for journalists who investigate corruption offenses and abuses of power, which become doubly dangerous for the country during the war. In addition, access to court decisions is a daily necessity in the activities of lawyers, law enforcement officers, public activists and human rights defenders.

As a result of this severe pressure exerted by the authorities on the judiciary, a lot of absurd and frankly illegal decisions are made by courts. For example, people are sentenced for “unpatriotic and anti-state” mobile phone conversations, and all opposition parties in Ukraine were banned on the basis of fabricated, blueprinted judgments.

In this way, the courts have been transformed into tools for the suppression of democratic rights and dissent. Particularly severe sentences are passed against anti-war activists. One of the most infamous such cases is the story of the pacifist Ruslan Kotsaba. Several years ago (2015), he publicly called for an end to the war in the Donbas and for a refusal to mobilize. Kotsaba was then accused of treason and obstruction of hostilities and arrested.

He spent 524 days of arrest in custody. By the decision of the Ivano-Frankivsk city court, he was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and released only after pressure from international human rights organizations.

This systematic destruction of an independent judiciary in Ukraine, backed by the NATO powers, is yet another clear refutation of the lie that the war in Ukraine against Russia is waged “in defense of democracy.”