Mexico’s Senate on Wednesday narrowly passed a sweeping proposal to revamp the judiciary system, effectively clearing the last major obstacle to a measure that the country’s president had vowed to push through before stepping down at the end of this month.

The result reflects the exceptional sway of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and his party after his allies won large legislative majorities in June, enabling them to pass some of the Mexican leader’s most contentious and far-reaching proposals in his final weeks in office.

The measure would shift the judiciary from an appointment-based system largely grounded in training and qualifications to one where voters elect judges and there are few requirements to run — and it would remove 7,000 judges from their jobs, from the chief justice of the Supreme Court down to those at local courts.

The bill already passed in the lower house of Congress last week, during a marathon session. It will now go to the state legislatures, where it will need a majority to be enacted into law. Mr. López Obrador’s governing Morena party and its allies control 25 of 32 state legislatures, so it is expected to be approved with ease.

When that happens, voters could start electing thousands of federal, state and local judges as soon as next year.

The debate, which started on Tuesday, was temporarily suspended after a group of protesters, megaphones and Mexican flags in hand, barged into the Senate building calling on senators to block the overhaul. Protesters followed the lawmakers to another venue, where an opposition senator was assaulted when someone threw gasoline on his face. Police officers later dispersed demonstrations using fire extinguishers.

After a heated session in which legislators accused each other of being “traitors” and “liars,” 86 senators approved the bill and 41 voted against it. The Senate must still resolve several disputed provisions in the bill before it can go to the state legislatures.

The government says the overhaul is needed to modernize the judiciary and to instill trust in a system plagued by graft, influence-peddling and nepotism. Mr. López Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, takes office on Oct. 1 and has fully backed the plan.

However, the proposal has met fierce resistance from judicial workers, law experts, investors, judges, students, opposition legislators and other critics. Mr. López Obrador’s determination to push it through has kept financial markets on edge and caused a diplomatic spat with the U.S. and Canada’s ambassadors. Even leaders in the Catholic church have said the election of judges would not guarantee a better delivery of justice for Mexico’s victims of criminal violence.

“Where does that leave my 27 years of service? I started from the bottom,” said Sandra Herrera Benítez, a court clerk and spokeswoman for judicial workers in the northern city of Monterrey, who went on strike last month with thousands of other federal court workers across Mexico. “Now, to be a judge or magistrate you have to be friends with the president or some politician.”

Experiences in countries such as the United States or Bolivia, where voters can elect some judges, have shown that doing so carries the risk of making judicial seats more politicized.

“Judges respond to the incentives that elections create,” said Amrit Singh, a law professor at Stanford University and an expert on rule of law. “The judiciary will be politicized beyond recognition.”

Mr. López Obrador first presented his idea of overhauling the judiciary last year. Angered at the Supreme Court for blocking some of his administration’s plans, such as weakening Mexico’s electoral watchdog agency or putting the National Guard under the military’s control, he vowed to have judges and justices elected by popular vote — a move seen as retaliation by some analysts.

“The judiciary is hopeless, it is rotten,” he told reporters back then, calling on his supporters to give his political movement large majorities in Congress at the polls in order to pass the overhaul and change the constitution.

On Election Day, voters cemented Morena’s dominance in the lower house but left the Senate a few seats short of a supermajority. On Wednesday, however, Morena and its allies secured the two-thirds majority required for passage when three opposition senators voted in favor of the overhaul. Another opposition senator, Daniel Barreda, was absent from the vote because his father had been detained by the authorities in southern Mexico, he told reporters.

Days before the vote, opposition legislators said they had been threatened, blackmailed and offered bribes to get them to approve the overhaul.

In recent weeks, protests and strikes erupted across the country over the proposed changes. Judicial workers and their supporters have organized sit-ins to block access to the lower house of Congress and the Senate.

Still, people have also taken to the streets to defend the overhaul. More than half of the country’s business leaders support the proposal, according to Mexico’s association of chambers of commerce. Polls commissioned by Morena indicate around 80 percent of the participants think revamping the judicial system is necessary — though other polls find that more than 50 percent of those surveyed don’t know what the overhaul entails.

The tension has even divided the Supreme Court. Justice Loretta Ortiz, who was appointed by Mr. López Obrador and has called herself a “founder of Morena,” said on social media that the overhaul “will decisively contribute to guaranteeing the access to justice that Mexicans deserve.”

Some experts say it will takes years for the impact of the legislation to be fully understood.

“The president’s proposal is an experiment,” said Vanessa Romero Rocha, a lawyer and political analyst, adding that the overhaul’s effect will need to be evaluated in a few years time as there is no precedent for it. “The president’s main objective, so I see it, is to remove all the judges who have been around for a long time and who are deeply corrupt.”

Yet others say that the current plan would exacerbate the problems of corruption that the government is trying to eliminate.

“The dismantling of the judiciary is not the way forward,” Norma Piña, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who opposes the measures, said in a televised message on Sunday. She also presented a counterproposal to redesign the system.

That plan includes steps such as making the selection of judges more transparent so as to prevent nepotism and privilege merit, creating independent disciplinary mechanisms, strengthening local judiciaries — where corruption is more prevalent — and improving state prosecutors’ offices.

But the judiciary’s counterproposal, analysts say, came a little too late.

“This reform is and will be historic. It will change the way the judiciary is seen and conceived,” said Morena senator Ernestina Godoy Ramos during Tuesday’s debate. “Justice is everyone’s business.”

Miriam Castillo contributed research from Mexico City.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrived in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, on Wednesday morning at a precarious moment in the nation’s defense against the Russian invasion.

The visit comes as the Biden administration struggles to curtail aid to Russia from Iran, North Korea and China, and as the U.S. presidential elections loom over the conflict.

Mr. Blinken stepped off a private overnight train from Poland that also carried his British counterpart, David Lammy. The two men are scheduled to meet throughout the day with Ukrainian officials, including the country’s new top diplomat, Andrii Sybiha, who was appointed last Thursday by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as part of a major overhaul of the government’s top ranks.

The joint visit by Mr. Blinken and Mr. Lammy was aimed at presenting a strong show of solidarity for Ukraine — a message to both Mr. Zelensky and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, as well as the rest of the world.

While both men have made comments in recent months theoretically indicating an openness to negotiating a settlement to the over 30-month full-scale war begun by Moscow, Mr. Putin’s vision of a reconstituted Russian empire is untenable to Ukraine, and U.S. officials say he has shown no signs of wanting to reach a peace agreement. Mr. Putin’s grand invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a continuation of his annexation of Crimea and military offensive in eastern Ukraine that began in 2014.

Mr. Zelensky said last month that his multiphase plan for peace involves forcing Russia to end the war on terms that are “fair” to Ukraine.

The first debate between former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris took place in the middle of the night during the train ride. A few passengers on Mr. Blinken’s train stayed up to watch at least the start of the debate, after a few sips of wine, but most scrambled online in the morning to read assessments of the televised event.

Officials in Ukraine were no doubt tracking the debate as well: Mr. Trump, who admires Mr. Putin, has rallied a significant number of Republican politicians to oppose U.S. military aid to Ukraine, while Ms. Harris has vowed to continue the Biden administration’s policies of supporting the besieged country.

In recent weeks, the Ukrainian military has made a surprising incursion into the Russian region Kursk and managed to hold onto captured territory, lifting morale in Ukraine. But that offensive has failed to divert Russian units from their onslaught in eastern Ukraine, where they continue to make small gains.

Mr. Blinken and Mr. Lammy are expected to listen to entreaties from Ukrainian officials for permission for the Ukrainian military to use American and British weapons for strikes deep into Russian territory. In May, the Biden administration gave Ukraine permission to use U.S. weapons for shorter cross-border attacks against Russian sites being used in an offensive against the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Since then, U.S. officials have allowed the Ukrainian military to make that kind of shorter strike at other places along the border.

Mr. Blinken said in an interview with Sky News on Tuesday that the Biden administration had to take complex factors into account when making such decisions, but did not rule out giving more latitude to Ukraine.

“We’ve adapted and adjusted every step along the way, and we’ll continue — so not ruling out at this stage,” he said. “We don’t. We never rule out. But when we rule in, we want to make sure it’s done in such a way that it can advance what the Ukrainians are trying to achieve.”

Mr. Blinken and Mr. Lammy said at a news conference in London on Tuesday that Iran had shipped short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, confirming earlier news reports based on U.S. and European officials’ assessments. They said they were coordinating on actions to take against Iran and Russia. The U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday announced details of sanctions they were imposing against 10 individuals and six entities, as well as four vessels.

“It is definitely a significant escalation,” by Iran, Mr. Lammy said. Iranian officials have denied they made any such shipment.

Until now, Iran has mainly been supplying Russia with drones, while North Korea has been providing artillery shells. The Biden administration says Chinese companies are selling factory machine tools and microelectronics to Russia to help it rebuild its arms production industry.

Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, arrived in Iraq on Wednesday for his first trip abroad since taking office in July, a demonstration of the value the Iranians place on the strategic alliance with their neighbor as tensions rise in the region around them.

Mr. Pezeshkian’s three-day trip will include visits to several cities that represent Iran’s political, religious, economic and security interests in Iraq. He was traveling with a delegation of senior officials and businessmen, according to Iranian media.

“I imagine this will be a very good trip for making economic, cultural, political and security ties,” Mr. Pezeshkian said, according to televised remarks on state media. “And I hope we can forge closer and brotherly ties to all Islamic countries starting from Iraq.”

In Baghdad, Mr. Pezeshkian met with the Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, and President Abdul Latif Rashid. He was also expected to talk with other senior officials.

The trip comes as Iraq moves closer to taking a number of steps that align with Iran’s long-term objectives, including moving forward on negotiations for the departure of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Iran and the United States have regarded each other as enemies since the 1979 hostage crisis and have not had diplomatic relations since then. Iran has been leery of the presence of those U.S. troops, which they see as a potential danger.

But the drawdown will likely be spread over two years — far slower than Iran had wanted. And a number of questions remain unanswered, including whether U.S. troops in Syria would leave at the same time.

There are about 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and about 900 in Syria, many of them Special Operations forces. The primary focus of both groups is helping to fight the Islamic State, the militant group that, especially in the last year or so, has begun to rebuild and to launch regular attacks in Syria.

A few hours before Mr. Pezeshkian’s plane touched down, a rocket attack on U.S. troops based at Baghdad Airport served as a reminder of the volatility in the region. Iraq’s joint command said it was investigating the attack’s origins, but there have been repeated attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq by armed groups with links to Iran.

On Thursday, Mr. Pezeshkian is expected to travel to Karbala and Najaf, two cities that are especially holy to Shia Muslims and are popular destinations for Iranian pilgrims — several million of whom visit annually, greatly lifting Iraq’s tourism income.

Then he will go to the southern city of Basra, an important trade hub because of its proximity to Iran’s southern borders. Mr. Pezeshkian is expected to travel to the northern Kurdistan region and visit the cities of Sulaymaniyah and Erbil on Friday.

The visit comes as tensions have flared anew between Iran and Israel. After the assassination in July of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Iran, there have been fears of a widening war if Iran retaliates.

Iraq has served as an economic and political gateway of sorts for Iran to the Arab world, and analysts say the decision to choose it as the destination of his first official trip falls in line with Mr. Pezeshkian’s two main policy goals: strengthening the Iranian economy and forging closer ties with regional Arab countries.

“The government considers relations with Iraq extremely important,” Hamid Hosseini, a member of the board of directors of the Iran and Iraq Joint Chamber of Commerce, said in a telephone interview from Tehran. “Our security is linked to one another. We share cultural ties. And economically, Iran needs to grow its presence in Iraq’s growing and emerging market.”

Iraq ranks, after China, as Iran’s second-largest trade partner. And while China mainly buys Iran’s crude oil and petrochemical products, the Iraqi market is more varied. Imports include Iranian-made household goods, construction material and other products, said Mr. Hosseini, who added that trade between Iran and Iraq had nearly doubled since 2023.

But the banking sanctions imposed by the United States, Mr. Hosseini said, have made it difficult for Iran to gain access to all the money this trade earns. Mr. Pezeshkian is expected to try to negotiate the release of some $10 billion in Iranian assets held up in Iraq.

Since the fall of Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, in 2003 after the U.S.-led military invasion, Iran has invested heavily in expanding its influence in Iraq. One upshot of these efforts is Iran’s using Baghdad as a mediator to try to help restore broken ties with Saudi Arabia. It has also connected Iran, by land and air, to its allies like Lebanon and Syria. And Iraq can also help Iran forge closer ties with Jordan and Egypt, analysts say.

Iran’s new foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in an interview on Monday with an Iraqi television channel, Al Forat, that the president’s trip showed “the depth of our relations” with Iraq. The two countries, he said, are “on the right path for controlling our border security and violent groups.”

Last week, Baghdad’s central government forcibly relocated Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, including an armed separatist militant group called Komala, from near Iran’s borders. Komala said in a statement that it had been evicted from its headquarters and moved about 40 miles north to the Dukan region in northern Iraq.

The relocation came after years of Iranian pressure and a security agreement between the two countries.

And on Tuesday, Iraq extradited to Iran a Kurdish political activist, Behzad Khosravi, a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, according to the party and Iranian media reports. His arrest and extradition raised alarm among Iranian political activists that Iraqi Kurdistan may no longer be a safe refuge.

Iraqi Kurdistan has two rival parties, which have strongholds in Sulaymaniyah and Erbil. Iran has traditionally had close ties with the party based in Sulaymaniyah, but relations with Erbil have been tense because of a large American military base there. Iran has attacked the Kurdistan region of Iraq with missiles targeting bases of Kurdish opposition groups and buildings it said Israel was using as secret bases. Iraq and Kurdish officials denied the latter.

Leily Nikounazar and Falih Hassan contributed reporting.

More than a year after it became an open war zone, deadly ethnic violence has resurged this month in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur. The local authorities have reimposed a curfew and an internet blackout as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government struggles to quell the unrest.

The conflict, which started in May 2023, was ignited by a dispute between two groups, the Meitei and the Kuki, over the Meitei’s claim to receive a special status guaranteeing allotment of government jobs and the right to buy land.

More than 200 people have been reported killed and at least 60,000 displaced in the unrest. After pitched violence broke out, with villages burned and reports of sexual assaults widespread, the Indian Army moved in and effectively partitioned the state between the two groups.

During India’s general election this spring, opposition politicians repeatedly criticized Mr. Modi for saying little about the Manipur unrest and not doing enough to stop it. Mr. Modi has stood by the state’s chief minister, N. Biren Singh, a member of his Bharatiya Janata Party. Critics of Mr. Singh, who is part of the majority Meitei community, say he has exacerbated the violence with his partisan statements and handling of the conflict.

While the violence had subsided over the past few months, it came roaring back in recent weeks, with 11 people — eight Kukis and three Meiteis — killed in attacks, according to data collected by Kuki and Meitei organizations. The Manipur police said there had been a “significant escalation” in the 16-month conflict, accusing Kuki militants of using drones and long-range rockets against civilians and security forces.

The state government imposed the new curfew and suspended internet service after protests by students demanding peace. The police used force to prevent protesters from storming the official residences of the state’s governor and of the chief minister. The demonstrators are demanding the resignation of all sitting local lawmakers, of the leaders of the state police and of the state’s top security adviser.

India cuts internet service more often than any other country to contain outbreaks of unrest, according to a report by Keep It On, an advocacy group that monitors shutdowns. The Manipur government said it had suspended internet access to thwart “antisocial elements” who could use social media to incite the “passions of the public.”

The current conflict traces back to a ruling by the state’s High Court that could grant a special tribal status to the Meitei, who make up just over half of the state’s fewer than three million people and are the most politically powerful group.

India’s Supreme Court has since ruled that the Manipur decision was “completely factually wrong,” but the conflict between the two groups, which had simmered for decades, has raged on.

Hoihnu Hauzel, a journalist and researcher from Manipur, said that the national government under Mr. Modi needed to move with more urgency to end the violence. His government, she said, had instead let the Manipur unrest “fester,” hoping that it would “die a natural death.”

“If two communities are not able to see eye to eye,” Ms. Hauzel added, the solution to the fighting “has to come from outside,” meaning from the national government.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico leaves office at the end of September. But before he does, he will see one of his final missions largely fulfilled: a sweeping redesign of the judiciary that he says is needed to fight corruption.

The changes championed by the president would shift the judiciary from an appointment-based system largely grounded in training and qualifications to one where voters elect judges and there are few requirements to run. Nearly all of Mexico’s more than 7,000 judges could be affected by the measure, making the overhaul one of the most sweeping of its kind attempted anywhere in the world in recent decades, according to legal scholars.

The changes would apply to the 11 justices currently on the Supreme Court; 1,635 federal judges and magistrates; and more than 5,700 judges at the state and local level. Long lists of requirements to become a judge would be eliminated, especially at the federal level, opening the way for people who simply have a law degree and a few years of legal experience to run.

The measure was approved in the lower house of Congress last week, and it overcame its biggest obstacle when it was narrowly passed in the Senate on Wednesday — even after protesters barged into the building and interrupted the session on Tuesday. It will now go to Mexico’s state legislatures, where it is expected to easily pass in the coming months.

The proposed measure could produce one of the most far-reaching judicial overhauls of any major democracy. Relatively few countries allow judges to be elected on a significant scale, but none to the degree that Mr. López Obrador is proposing, according to legal scholars.

The government says the measure is needed to modernize the judiciary and instill trust in a system plagued by graft, influence-peddling and nepotism. Mr. López Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, takes office on Oct. 1 and has fully backed the plan.

But critics of the overhaul argue that the plan would do little to fix problems like corruption and would instead enhance the power of Mr. López Obrador’s nationalistic political movement.

Here is what to know about Mexico’s proposed judicial overhaul.

What would the measure do?

The proposal would change the way judges are selected throughout Mexico’s judiciary, shifting to a system where candidates for judgeships must stand for election instead of being appointed based largely on a battery of tests, qualifications and training.

However, the measure would not apply to military judges, or judges involved in land conflicts or specific disputes between administrative agencies and citizens. Such exceptions account for a small fraction of Mexico’s judges.

The proposal would also reshape the Supreme Court by reducing the number of justices from 11 to nine and shortening their term limits from 15 to 12 years. In some cases, the salaries and benefits of justices could be reduced to cut costs.

Additionally, the policy change would create a Tribunal for Judicial Discipline, whose members would also be elected by popular vote and have broad powers to investigate and possibly even fire or impeach judges. The tribunal’s decisions would be final and not subject to appeal.

Why are judges, court workers and critics upset by it?

Mr. López Obrador’s plan has sparked recent protests across the country and has even been the center of a diplomatic spat with the U.S. ambassador, Ken Salazar, who called it “a major risk to the functioning of Mexico’s democracy.”

Many critics of the overhaul agree that the system needs revamping. But they warn that the government’s proposal would do little to rid the judiciary of its problems. Instead, they say it would erode judicial independence and allow Mr. López Obrador’s political movement to concentrate power.

Specifically, critics of Mr. López Obrador and his allies express concern that the measures could lock in their current political advantages for a longer period of time by getting judges elected who are aligned with the ruling Morena party.

Some foreign companies are concerned that the changes could make it harder to find judges who are impartial when examining disputes between the government and businesses. Other critics have warned that drug cartels could attempt to influence the new judicial elections, much as they have done in other political races around the country.

Although a few countries do allow the election of some judges by popular vote — including the United States, Switzerland and Japan — experts say none of them do it in such a sweeping way as the proposed changes in Mexico would.

The determination to push through the measures has kept financial markets on edge, marked by a more than 15 percent plunge since early June in the value of the currency, the peso.

When could the measures be approved and implemented?

The leaders of Mr. López Obrador’s Morena party sought to push the measures through Congress this month, before Mr. Lopez Obrador’s tenure ends on Oct. 1. The measure passed in the lower house last week with 357 lawmakers present voting in favor of the overhaul and 130 opposing it. On Wednesday, the Senate also passed the overhaul with 86 votes in favor. A total of 41 senators opposed it.

Beside being passed by both houses of Congress, the measures have to be adopted by a majority of state legislatures — an easy task, since Morena and its allies have a majority in most state congresses. The changes would be implemented gradually, with a large portion of the judiciary up for election in 2025 and the rest in 2027. That means that all 32 states need to change their constitutions and choose either to organize elections in 2025 or wait two years.

Dawn Michelle Hunt loved sweepstakes. A 42-year-old temp worker in Chicago, she entered almost every contest she encountered. So when she got an email from someone who described himself as a British lawyer saying she had won a trip to Australia, she was elated.

“I hit it big,” she told her father after the plane ticket arrived.

The trip took her through China to pick up the prize documents, along with handbags that she was instructed to carry on to Australia. The British lawyer had promised in an email to meet her there. “My dear Dawn,” he called her.

But sewn into the lining of the bags was more than two kilos, or 4.5 pounds, of methamphetamines, Chinese authorities say. Instead of a resort in Australia, Ms. Hunt landed in a Chinese prison, sentenced to death, with a two-year reprieve. Ms. Hunt’s sentence, handed down in 2017, was later commuted to life.

Ms. Hunt and her family say that she was an unwitting victim of an elaborate drug trafficking scheme, versions of which have ensnared people around the world, including a number of older Americans.

Courts in some cases have handed down reduced sentences, recognizing that the offenders had been duped into being drug mules. China is known for its strict drug laws, and a review of several cases there with similar circumstances — in which foreign offenders may have been scammed or set up — indicates that courts are not so lenient in such cases.

In a ruling on Ms. Hunt’s case, a judge acknowledged the ruse, but concluded that she was smart enough to have realized what was really happening by the time she arrived in Asia.

Her family says the American government needs to intervene with China on Ms. Hunt’s behalf. “They’re part of the problem,” said her father, Gene Hunt.

Her family initially worried that Ms. Hunt, now 53, would be punished if they had spoken up. Now, a decade into her time behind bars, they are going public because her health is declining.

Her father said that she was raped by guards at a detention facility. Her brother, Tim Hunt, said she has been mistreated in prison for being Black. She has tumors in her ovaries and uterus, a possible symptom of cancer, according to a medical consent form the family received from the prison. China’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment on Ms. Hunt’s case.

Ms. Hunt’s situation raises questions about the duty of the United States government to help Americans who have broken the law while overseas, inadvertently or otherwise.

Americans in legal trouble abroad are entitled to consular help. People who meet certain criteria can be declared wrongfully detained, making them a priority for the State Department in discussions with the Chinese government. Ms. Hunt’s family has not pushed for the designation, which can take years to obtain. The criteria include being held by a foreign government for the purposes of influencing U.S. policy or extracting concessions, and being held in a country that the State Department has said lacks an independent judicial system.

A State Department spokeswoman, Lisa K. Heller, said in an emailed response that consular officers regularly visit Ms. Hunt, and did so most recently in July. “We take seriously our commitment to assist U.S. citizens abroad and stand ready to provide consular assistance,” she said.

John Kamm, founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group in San Francisco, says the State Department should do more for Hunt and other Americans held in China. That includes pushing for them to get longer phone calls and more visits with their families, better access to lawyers and for consular officials to check on prisoners more frequently.

Ms. Hunt grew up in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood, the daughter of police officers. Artistic and hard-working, she loved sewing and studied textile design. She thrived on pop culture, reading People magazine and tracking celebrities like Anthony Bourdain, and had no prior criminal record.

In 2014, Ms. Hunt heard she had won the contest.

She first flew to Hong Kong, where her hosts put her up at a hotel and let her order room service while waiting for a Chinese visa, Tim Hunt said. She continued to Guangzhou, in southern China. Just before her flight out of that city, she was taken to a leather market and given the meth-lined bags, according to the Chinese court ruling.

In prison, Ms. Hunt has wrestled with being convicted of a crime she says she didn’t knowingly commit. “What is the definition of Guilty in China?” she wrote in one letter home.

Courts in other countries have dealt with cases like Ms. Hunt’s in a range of ways. An American jury last year returned a not-guilty verdict for an 80-year-old man who was found carrying methamphetamines through an airport after a trip to Mexico City. In Malaysia, a court freed an Australian woman in 2019 who said she had fallen for a scam that involved picking up drugs in Shanghai. She had been sentenced to death but was released after five years, following an appeal.

But in Spain in 2020, a court sentenced an American man to seven and a half years in prison after he was found with cocaine sewn into jackets in his luggage, even though U.S. investigators told Spanish authorities that the man appeared to have been cajoled and deceived.

Tim Hunt will speak as a witness at a Sept. 18 hearing held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a bipartisan group of lawmakers focused on monitoring human rights in China.

In June, he flew to Guangzhou to visit his sister. She was worn and reticent, he said. A prison staffer hovered over her, taking notes.

Prison doctors have told Ms. Hunt that she may need surgery for her tumors, he said. She refused treatment because she didn’t trust the prison.

Kitty Bennett and Joy Dong contributed research.

Michel Barnier, the new French prime minister, did not thank President Emmanuel Macron for appointing him in his first remarks upon taking office last week. This was a declaration of independence.

The remarks were pointed in other ways. “We will certainly act more than we talk,” Mr. Barnier, 73, a pragmatist of the center-right, said, with a verbose president clearly in mind. He added that wisdom often comes from the poorest and humblest members of society “if one takes the time to listen.”

Again, the little barb was clearly pointed at a remote Mr. Macron, often impervious to counsel and dismissive of the needy.

This was a moment of “rupture,” in Mr. Barnier’s words. It was the end of an era, the return of the French old guard summarily evicted from the political arena when the upstart Mr. Macron triumphed in 2017; and it came at a moment when not even the lingering glory of the Paris Olympics can obscure the economic, social and political crisis faced by France.

During his seven years in office, Mr. Macron, 46, never before encountered, nor would he have tolerated, such conduct from prime ministers, who sometimes seemed little more than his pliant playthings. But, with almost three years left of his presidency, he is weakened. His party is no longer the largest in a fractured Parliament, his popularity is low, and his judgment is questioned.

The Fifth Republic was created in 1958 to curb instability through an all-powerful presidency. When the president is diminished, as now, an institutional vacuum takes hold.

French presidents have lost their majorities before, but always to a dominant opposition force that was then able to form a stable government, under what the French call a cohabitation. After a July parliamentary election, Mr. Macron had no clear winner to choose from — a unique situation in France, where cross-party coalition building is very uncommon.

The French crisis has been on full display since Mr. Macron, without informing his then prime minister, Gabriel Attal, 35, dissolved the 577-seat lower house of Parliament and called the snap elections three months ago.

A left-wing alliance came in first with 193 seats in those elections, only to lose through dogmatism and disarray. Mr. Barnier’s conservative Republicans languished in fourth place with 47 seats, only to win. A show of unified determination kept Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally from power, only for Mr. Macron to give the party and its allies, with 142 seats, an effective veto over the new government.

In the end, Mr. Macron, who has always portrayed the xenophobic National Rally as antithetical to French democracy, shot himself in the foot, which is painful. The National Rally’s elevation to arbiter was the price he had to pay.

“I believe that as of today, Mr. Barnier is a prime minister under surveillance,” Jordan Bardella, Ms. Le Pen’s 28-year-old protégé, declared in a TV interview this week. “We will undoubtedly have an arbitration role in the coming months.”

His claim was based on solid math. The left is implacably opposed to Mr. Barnier. If the extreme right at any moment joins in opposition, the 335 votes of the left and far right will be more than enough to bring the prime minister down. In other words, Ms. Le Pen only has to judge when renewed turmoil and ungovernability will best serve her bid to succeed Mr. Macron in 2027.

This is Mr. Barnier’s core dilemma. A former French foreign minister and E.U. commissioner who negotiated Brexit, he is a patient dealmaker who likes to quote his mother’s saying that “sectarianism is always a sign of weakness.” He has said there were will be no “red lines” in his attempt to form a government.

The task will be arduous and the urgency is great. More than 50 days of political paralysis before Mr. Barnier’s appointment worsened an already grave French economic situation.

With both France’s deficit and debt rising, the European Union has reprimanded the country for breaching fiscal rules, and a downgrade from one rating agency and warnings from two others in recent months have rattled French confidence.

As a result, the budget is Mr. Barnier’s first priority.

But how he will find the billions of euros in savings and additional revenue needed to stabilize the fiscal situation without further sharpening social tensions and angering already struggling families is unclear. A near-impossible balancing act appears to await him.

Mr. Barnier is of the moderate center-right family often referred to in France as Gaullism. He dislikes the jingoistic National Rally and the dogmatic far left in roughly equal measure. Yet he will have to offer concessions if he wants his government to have any hope of long-term survival.

In practice, this will likely mean a tough line on immigration to comfort the National Rally. Mr. Barnier has already said borders are far too porous. Other demands of the National Rally include a change in the French parliamentary election system to introduce proportional representation, and lowering costs for the less privileged, especially their monthly energy bills.

To appease the left and labor unions, whose capacity to bring demonstrators into the streets is a near constant threat, Mr. Barnier may have to reopen the issue of Mr. Macron’s signature and bitterly contested 2023 law raising the retirement age in France to 64 from 62.

This was an attempt to curb the ballooning cost of pensions for an aging, longer-lived population and to bring France closer to European norms, but it also proved to be an unpardonable offense to the French view of a proper work-life balance. Many French people see retirement as the dawn of a more pleasurable life.

Mr. Barnier, who once urged raising the retirement age to 65, will not seek to revoke the law but has said it may be possible to “improve it,” without specifying how. Any such improvement, however, seems likely to raise government costs at a moment when France is desperate to reduce them.

Mr. Macron would also be particularly sensitive to any tampering with the law. His goal has been a business-friendly France. His policies have drawn enormous foreign investment and significant innovation in a growing tech sector. He emerged from the Socialist Party, but it became clear over time that he is a politician of the center-right, one reason for some of the anger directed at him.

He and his entourage have made clear he will now govern differently — more as arbiter and guarantor of the Republic than as top-down, all-directing leader. Only time will tell how far he will honor this commitment.

But it is already clear that the high point of Macronism — a centrist mix of shifting policies without an effective political party dedicated to marginalizing the left and right and rendering those labels redundant — is long passed. Right and left are resurgent.

Booed at the closing of the Paralympics last weekend, despite his Olympic success, Mr. Macron is a much reduced figure, at least on the domestic front.

As for Mr. Barnier, he was chosen in the end by Mr. Macron as the best hope for institutional stability. But he was hardly the choice of the French electorate that voted in July, and that is an institutional problem that may prove hard to overcome.