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FIRST AMENDMENT
University settles free speech lawsuit with student for $80K
The Southern Illinois University Edwardsville settled a lawsuit from one of its former students for $80,000.
Maggie DeJong was studying towards her master's degree in art therapy counseling when she received three no-contact orders against her from the school after three of her fellow students complained about her political opinions. DeJong's Christian faith has informed her conservative views, which she spoke of openly and posted to her social media. Following the no-contact order, DeJong filed a lawsuit against the university for violating her first amendment right.
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Student Threat Charges
“Public universities can’t punish students for expressing their political and religious viewpoints. Maggie, like every other student, is protected under the First Amendment to respectfully share her personal beliefs, and university officials were wrong to issue gag orders and silence her speech,” Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Mathew Hoffmann said in a statement. “As a result of Maggie’s courage in filing suit, SIUE has agreed to take critical steps to comply with the law and the U.S. Constitution and move closer to accepting and embracing true diversity of thought and speech.”
As a result, former Chancellor of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Randall G. Pembrook, Director for Equal Opportunity, Access, and Title IX Coordination Jamie Ball, and Program Director of the Art Therapy Counseling Graduate Program Megan A. Robb will undergo a First Amendment training session from the ADF. They also promised to change the university's policies "to ensure students with varying political, religious, and ideological views are welcome in the art therapy program," per the ADF.
“DeJong clearly has the right, as enshrined in the First Amendment, to express her religious, political, and social views on her personal social media account and to engage in mutual conversations with fellow students regarding those opinions without fear of retaliation from school officials,” U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois wrote in its decision in March when the university attempted to dismiss the lawsuit.
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SIUE had an undergraduate population of less than 10,000 students in 2021. It is one of two campuses in the Southern Illinois University system.
DeJong graduated with her degree last year, around the same time the lawsuit was filed.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/university-settles-free-speech-lawsuit-80k
suit sauce https://adflegal.org/sites/default/files/2022-05/DeJong-v-Pembrook-2022-05-31-Complaint.pdf
UK formally declares Islamic State atrocities against Iraq’s Yazidi minority as genocide
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s government on Tuesday formally declared that atrocities committed by the Islamic State group against the Yazidi people in Iraq were acts of genocide.
The U.K. Foreign Office said the government’s official acknowledgement came after a recent landmark ruling by the German Federal Court of Justice, which found a former member of IS, also known by its Arabic acronym Daesh, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Britain previously gave official acknowledgement of four other instances in which genocide occurred, including the Holocaust; in Cambodia during the 1970s under the Khmer Rouge, the 1994 mass ethnic killings in Rwanda; and the 1995 massacre of men and boys in and near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.
“The Yazidi population suffered immensely at the hands of Daesh nine years ago, and the repercussions are still felt to this day,” Tariq Ahmad, the U.K.'s minister of state for the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and United Nations. “Justice and accountability are key for those whose lives have been devastated,”
Tuesday’s decision was announced ahead of events in Baghdad marking nine years since the Islamic State group began atrocities targeting the Yazidi minority, considered heretics by the militant group.
The Islamic State declared a self-styled caliphate in a large swath of territory in Syria and Iraq that it seized in 2014. The extremist group attacked the heartland of the Yazidi community at the foot of Sinjar Mountain that year, killing hundreds of Yazidis and abducting thousands, more than half of them women and girls.
A regional court in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2021 sentenced Taha Al-J., whose full name wasn’t released because of privacy rules, to life imprisonment over the death of a 5-year-old Yazidi girl he had purchased as a slave and then chained up in the hot sun to die.
In January, Germany’s Federal Court upheld the sentence and rejected the defendant’s appeal. The case was the first conviction of an IS member for genocide.
Others including the United Nations and the European Parliament have also pronounced the IS assault on the Yazidis a genocide.
https://apnews.com/article/islamic-state-yazidi-iraq-genocide-019fcf49c05c23a2214b9f453c7959c6