For years, the city of Sherwood, Arkansas, home to about 30,000 people, had a practice of jailing people who could not afford to pay court costs incurred from bounced checks. Thousands of Arkansans were locked up—sometimes after bouncing checks in small amounts—when they could not pay crushing fees, fines, and other costs that compounded their debt by as much as 10 times the original amount.

Today, thanks to litigation brought by the ACLU, the ACLU of Arkansas, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Sherwood has agreed to stop jailing people for being poor.

Under this week’s settlement, the city agreed that it will not jail or issue arrest warrants for people because they can’t afford to pay their debts. Sherwood also agreed to clearly advise defendants of their rights before sentencing, ensure that defendants have access to counsel, and offer community service and other alternatives in lieu of court fines.

This is what criminal justice reform looks like.

Before this settlement, bouncing a check could have resulted in an arrest warrant, loss of driver’s license, levying of excessive fines, and even a jail sentence.

One defendant was arrested at least seven times, spent 25 days in jail, and was assessed $2,700 in court costs for bouncing a single $29 check. Another wrote 11 checks totaling about $200, and was arrested seven times, spent weeks in jail, and was assessed thousands of dollars in court costs, fines and fees.

The Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution prohibit the state from punishing someone just because they’re poor. These fundamental constitutional rights ensure that even if you are sentenced to pay a fine, you cannot then be re-arrested and sent to jail because of your inability to pay that fine.

Though this settlement marks a victory, Sherwood is one city. Vulnerable people in the state and across the nation are still being trapped in a never-ending cycle of escalating debt and incarceration — with devastating human costs. In too many communities, politicians and courts have created and are still carrying out one set of rules for those who are well-off, and another more punitive set of rules for those who aren’t.

Other Arkansas courts should take notice of these long-overdue reforms in Sherwood.

As illogical as it sounds, courts routinely suspend the drivers’ licenses of those who are too poor to pay their fines and fees on time, typically with no notice or opportunity to be heard. It’s illogical because, without a drivers’ license, people lose their jobs and income – making it even harder to pay what they owe. Many Arkansans have no other means of transportation for taking their children to school or to the doctor’s office, or getting to the job that buys the groceries; suspending their drivers’ licenses channels these people toward the necessity of committing the crime of driving without a license, yet another crime for which the court could fine or jail them.

These policies that punish the poor have created staggering racial disparities and fueled a mass incarceration crisis that has cost billions of dollars and failed to make anyone safer.

Arkansas public officials should reflect on the Constitution they have sworn to uphold and the rights it guarantees to every Arkansan, and carry out their duties accordingly. The right to a fair trial, due process, and equal protection under the law are not luxuries for the privileged few. They are freedoms afforded to all of us. There has been progress in Sherwood, and the rest of the state of Arkansas should take note and follow to protect the rights of all.

The European Court of Human Rights last week held a hearing in a challenge to the United Kingdom’s mass surveillance practices, brought by the ACLU, Privacy International, Liberty, and seven other human rights organizations from around the world.

The case challenges practices, revealed by Edward Snowden, that breach the rights to privacy and freedom of expression, which are guaranteed not only under U.S. domestic law, but also under international human rights law.

The European Court of Human Rights is a critical component of the international human rights system. The court enforces the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty ratified by 47 nations, including the United Kingdom. Its judgments are legally binding, and its jurisprudence helps shape the interpretation of human rights laws around the world — including those that bind the United States.

Our case, the first before the court to directly challenge surveillance on the scale revealed by the Snowden disclosures, calls upon the court to articulate how human rights standards apply to modern state surveillance capabilities in an age of digital communication.

What does the case challenge?

The case before the court challenges the U.K. government’s bulk interception of internet traffic transiting through undersea fiber optic cables landing in the U.K., as well as its access to communications and data intercepted in bulk by the intelligence services of other countries, such as the NSA. The case also seeks to shed light on the secret information-sharing agreements governing the British government’s access to these troves of NSA-collected data — and vice versa.

The NSA’s bulk collection has included, for example, its recordings of every single cellphone call into, out of, and within at least two countries; its collection of hundreds of millions of contact lists and address books from personal email and instant-messaging accounts; and its surreptitious interception of data from Google and Yahoo user accounts as that information travelled between those companies’ data centers located abroad.

The U.K. government’s mass surveillance program bears some similarities to the U.S. government’s “Upstream” surveillance, which is the subject of a separate challenge by the ACLU. The U.K. government intercepts internet traffic by attaching probes to undersea fiber optic cables. The probes permit the intelligence agencies to extract the traffic, which is then filtered according to “selectors” or “search criteria”. The full scope of permissible selectors and search criteria is unknown, and there is no meaningful regulation or oversight of their use. This intercepted information is then stored in databases, which analysts can query, comb through, or call up to examine in more detail.

The U.K. and U.S also grant each other broad access to the intelligence they gather. The NSA, for example, has access to the internet traffic that the U.K. government intercepts from the undersea fiber optic cables. The U.K. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), in turn, has access to a database containing the content and metadata of hundreds of millions of text messages collected by the NSA. The U.S. and U.K. governments also both have access to a network of servers storing information acquired under various programs operated by their respective intelligence agencies.

How do these practices breach human rights?

These mass surveillance practices breach the European Convention on Human Rights, which recognizes the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. The convention states that any state interference with these rights must be in accordance with law, and be necessary and proportionate.

The “in accordance with law” requirement stipulates a series of safeguards that a state should adopt to avoid abuses of power where the state conducts surveillance. These safeguards include an individualized suspicion of wrongdoing, which is inherently in tension with a mass surveillance program; prior judicial authorization; and notification to those whose information has been intercepted.

The U.K. government’s mass surveillance practices fail to meet the “in accordance with law” requirement, both because the legal framework is so opaque and because that framework lacks any of the safeguards outlined above.

With respect to the “necessity” requirement, the court has indicated that given “the potential of cutting-edge surveillance technologies to invade citizens’ privacy”:

“A measure of secret surveillance can be found as being in compliance with the Convention only if it is strictly necessary, as a general consideration, for the safeguarding the democratic institutions and, moreover, if it is strictly necessary, as a particular consideration, for the obtaining of vital intelligence in an individual operation.”

Finally, the principle of proportionality requires that the interference with privacy be proportionate to the aim pursued by the government and that the government has no less restrictive means of pursuing its aim. Yet bulk surveillance, by its very nature, is not proportionate as it interferes with the privacy of millions of people. And the legal framework governing bulk interception does not require the British government to demonstrate why the information sought cannot be obtained by less intrusive means.

What are the implications of the court’s decision in this case?

The European Court of Human Rights has jurisdiction over 47 member states. The judgment in this case will therefore have significant implications for the legality of surveillance programs conducted in each of those countries. It will be binding on the United Kingdom and provide guidance to the other member states in evaluating the compliance of their own surveillance programs with the convention.

Moreover, as one of the first direct challenges to mass surveillance within the international human rights framework, the judgment will also influence the interpretation of other international human rights instruments, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the U.S. ratified in 1992. A determination that U.K. mass surveillance programs are incompatible with human rights will send a clear message that comparable surveillance programs in other parts of the world, such as those conducted by the NSA, are also fundamentally incompatible with human rights.

More broadly speaking, the case highlights that all persons are entitled to the rights to privacy and freedom of expression by virtue of our common humanity. It is only because the European Convention on Human Rights speaks this universal language that an American organization like the ACLU was able to bring this case before the U.K. courts and eventually before the European Court of Human Rights.

This universal language of human rights is particularly suited to a context where digital communications can be sent, routed, and stored across the world from their point of origin. Just as Americans should be concerned about the U.K. and other states capturing their private data, this case should prompt global consideration for how U.S. surveillance programs violate the rights of millions of people around the world.

Ailidh Callander and Scarlet Kim are lawyers at Privacy International.

The Guantánamo military commissions, the scheme created by the government to try 9/11 and other detainees, have devolved into an unacceptable and alarming assault on defense lawyers attempting to provide fair representation to their clients.

A new letter, drafted by the ACLU and joined by 150 death penalty lawyers and law professors, registers the capital defense community’s outrage over the legal breakdown, which clearly violates federal and international law.

In the current crisis, Brig. Gen. John Baker, a decorated combat veteran and the second-highest ranking lawyer in the Marine Corps, was sentenced to 21 days of confinement by the presiding military judge in the prosecution of Abd Rahim Hussein Al-Nashiri, a suspect in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Gen. Baker, in his role as the chief defense counsel for the Guantánamo military commissions, had granted a request by Al-Nashiri’s defense counsel to withdraw from the capital case because of an ethical conflict that is secret but is known to involve government monitoring of attorney-client communications. Three of Al-Nashiri’s long-term lawyers then withdrew — including his one attorney qualified to work on death penalty cases. The lawyer left on the case was a junior military lawyer.

The presiding military judge, Col. Vance Spath, was displeased — both that the lawyers had withdrawn and that Gen. Baker granted their dismissal without his permission. How Judge Spath expressed that displeasure is where things went horribly wrong. He found Gen. Baker had acted in contempt of the court, and ordered him to be confined for 21 days. (Gen. Baker spent 48 hours confined to his trailer at “Camp Justice” on the Guantánamo naval base before being released after he filed a federal appeal, which is still pending.) Spath then ordered the young military lawyer with no death penalty experience to proceed with Al-Nashiri’s defense on his own.

Just as you would not expect a recent medical school graduate to perform a complex and risky surgery, you would not assign a junior lawyer without capital experience a leading role in a capital case.

Capital defense is a highly complex and specialized area of law. Both in traditional federal prosecutions and in the unique provisions for Guantánamo, there must be at a minimum two lawyers representing a person facing the death penalty, and at least one lawyer must be “learned counsel,” with distinguished prior experience and knowledge in the area of capital trials. Just as you would not expect a recent medical school graduate to perform a complex and risky surgery, you would not assign a junior lawyer without capital experience a leading role in a capital case.

Richard Kammen, Al-Nashiri’s former long-term capital defense counsel, had been on the case for nine years. He had been practicing law for 46 years and had served as lead capital counsel in numerous cases. In contrast, Al-Nashiri’s remaining defense counsel, Navy Lt. Alaric Piette, is a 2012 law school graduate who meets none of the requirements for “learned counsel.” He was added to the existing Al-Nashiri defense team just a few months ago. He has no prior capital experience, and no prior criminal defense experience with homicide charges. He rightly told the court exactly that.

Judge Spath ordered the young lawyer to represent Al-Nashiri on his own in the scheduled proceedings. The judge’s departure from the rules, which require learned counsel at every part of a capital prosecution, is inexplicable. Even beyond the binding military commission rules, the American Bar Association’s guidelines for capital cases have long explained that the unique and complex labyrinth of capital trial preparation and investigation requires qualified death penalty counsel represent the defendant at every stage of the proceedings. There is no exception to this rule because the expertise is deemed necessary throughout. Nonetheless, Judge Spath suggested that the junior defense counsel should, alone, stand in the place of learned counsel and a team with deep knowledge of the voluminous issues that the case raises. The young lawyer resisted, repeating several times, that he was “not qualified” to represent Mr. Al-Nashiri in the capital pretrial matter without learned counsel.

Judge Spath dismissed the lawyer’s refusal to speak as a trial “strategy,” as if requesting qualified counsel for his client was somehow a personal choice, designed to disrupt the case. The young lawyer pointed out that it was neither his nor his client’s choice: “This cannot be trial strategy. It was not our choice." Judge Spath ordered him to continue anyway.

The judge’s unjustified and reprehensible attack on defense counsel, and his insistence that a major capital trial go forward without experienced counsel, is just the latest in a long string of outrages in the Guantánamo military tribunals. Listening devices in attorney-client meeting rooms have been installed, disguised as smoke detectors. The FBI has infiltrated and investigated defense teams. Privileged legal mail is seized. Sadly, the list goes on.

The tribunals have become a costly farce, inflicting incalculable damage to due process and justice. This farce must end.