In the fall of 2007, a few of us were sitting around the conference table at the International Bridges to Justice, discussing IBJ’s programs in China, Cambodia and a nascent initiative in Burundi. IBJ Founder and CEO Karen Tse expressed her enthusiasm with the progress to date… but also an urgency to bring IBJ resources to criminal defenders worldwide. Scale, she said, was the key. “How can we connect and empower a global defender community? How can we set up global systems to systematically address defenders’ needs?”

In IBJ’s JusticeMakers Initiative, Karen might have found an answer.

In the four short months since the launch of www.justicemakers.net, IBJ has connected virtually with more than 2,500 unique web visitors from 125 countries worldwide. And while there is certainly a correlation between site visits and the places where IBJ has programs – we’ve had hundreds (!) of visits from places like Nigeria, Kenya and Pakistan – places where IBJ has yet to initiate activities. (This, in large part due to fantastic partners like Legal Rights Forum of Pakistan whose JusticeMakers poster is on the wall by my desk.)

But this initiative was about more than eyeballs on the internet. With eight $5,000 funding awards on the line, IBJ asked community members to propose concrete actions they could take to curb torture and legal abuse on a local level. After receiving 64 proposals from JusticeMakers in 28 countries, we have now identified 40 Finalists. Among them…

• A human rights curriculum distributed via DVD to local justice officials.
• The public exhibition of incidents of abuse to encourage pro-bono legal support.
• A text messaging service to aid women in the provision of counsel.

The ideas are creative, cost-effective and critical… and if we had the resources, we’d love to see all of these ideas come to fruition.

And while we don’t have the funds to finance all these projects, we do have a JusticeMakers community with an eagerness to engage and a deep understanding of criminal justice. Through JusticeMakers’ People’s Choice Awards, IBJ is empowering the community by making it collectively responsible for the financial fate of their projects. (According to James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowds, this diverse, global group of criminal justice stakeholders possesses the collective wisdom to determine project of the highest quality.) A final benefit of the People’s Choice Awards is that the applicants are now helping us grow the community at a rate of 60 new users per day – in an effort to get friends and colleagues to endorse their initiative.  (And thanks to partners like i-genius we’re reaching more and more social entrepreneurs people every day.)

So… a year after Karen challenged IBJ to broaden its reach, we’re now in direct contact with thousands of people worldwide. Twelve months after she prioritized defender engagement, these defenders are evaluating criminal justice innovations from around the world. And 52 weeks after she proposed expanding our impact, IBJ is set to seed eight concrete initiatives to curb torture and legal abuse on four continents.

What’s next? Let’s just say that Karen hasn’t stopped challenging the IBJ team. But based upon the commitment, creativity, and capability of my colleagues and the larger JusticeMakers community… the sky’s the limit.

The IBJ Fellow in Cambodia, Ouk Vandeth, recently conducted a training session for criminal defenders. The training was originally planned to accommodate for 15 participants. However, owing to an overwhelming amount of interest in the subject a total of 26 participants were allowed to attend.The subject of the training was the role of the investigating judge and the role of the defender during pre-trial detention. The materials presented focused on the procedures of pre-trial detention, the process for inquiry into the alleged crimes of the accused, the requirement to obtain an arrest warrant, the methods criminal defenders may adopt to request bail on the behalf of their clients and the rights of the accused to appeal the grounds of their detention when the crime they are accused of is not part of the law. All these issues were covered to provide the participants with an important understanding of how to better protect and represent their clients while awaiting trial.

The participants responded very enthusiastically to the training. All the participants found the training very helpful and recognised their need for such training to further carry out their duties. Many indicated at the end of the training that they we would to participate in further IBJ training session because they believed that there was still a lot they could learn about how to represent persons accused of crimes.

Ouk Vandeth has been an IBJ Fellow in Cambodia since 2006. He has many years experience working as a criminal defender in Cambodia and most recently served as the Director of Legal Aid Cambodia. Vandeth was a graduate of one of the earliest law classes in Cambodia aimed at legal defence. Prior to obtaining his law degree, Vandeth served as a police officer in Cambodia working closely with prosecutors and other department officials.