In May 2008, IBJ joined forces with the Ministry of Justice, the Bar Association of Kigali and the Belgian Technical Cooperation to launch its first Legal Rights Awareness Campaign in Kigali, Rwanda where IBJ presented the Ministry of Justice with 5,200 posters for distribution. Have the common aspirations to empower Rwandans with legal rights awareness made some progress since? The answer is a vibrant “yes!”

Women reading the “Know your Rights” posters		IBJ representative John Bosco Bugingo, left, with a fellow Bar member

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IBJ began planning the Burundi training program in earnest in February of 2008. It was my responsibility to adapt our work in China and Vietnam to this training. I was being assisted by a young Zimbabwean attorney, Marlon Zakeyo. Marlon had worked as an intern for IBJ for two years, during which time he had been building relationships with legal organizations in Africa.

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The following article was originally published in the December 2008 issue of the Montana Lawyer magazine:

In January of this year I had the good fortune to travel to Geneva, Switzerland on behalf of the Mansfield Center at The University of Montana to meet with Karen Tse, the CEO and founder of International Bridges to Justice (IBJ). Karen is a graduate of UCLA Law School and Harvard Divinity School, a former public defender, and the 2008 recipient of the ABA’s International Human Rights Award. We reached an agreement with IBJ to assist in developing criminal defense clinics in law schools in China. Clinical legal education is still new to China, and criminal defense clinics are even newer. Our current project has 8 participating Chinese law schools, and we will expand the project to 16 schools by the middle of next year. The project is being conducted in conjunction with the Chinese Committee on Clinical Legal Education, the umbrella organization for clinical education in China. Over the next few months, I will describe some of the problems and challenges to legal reform in China, and to the best of my ability give you my perspective on what it’s like for a practitioner from Montana to be participating in that reform.

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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.

As part of her effort to engage the global criminal justice community, IBJ Founder and CEO Karen Tse participated last month in New York University’s Reynolds Speaker Series. According to NYU, the series:

…presents prominent social entrepreneurs and leaders from across the spectrum of public and professional sectors who will share their insights as cutting-edge, far reaching change makers.

As always, Karen captivated the audience with her own background as a criminal defender and her insights into human rights in the 21st century. But what was particularly interesting and inspiring to me was the intensity and passion with which the audience responded to her comments.

At the end of the day, IBJ can scream its head off about the need to implement criminal justice legislation… but progress will only come when we can inspire the next generation of defenders and social entrepreneurs to invest their time, passion and resources in the transformation of their local legal infrastructure.

If the diverse and highly talented audience at NYU was an indication of that coalition, it seems we’re well on our way…

Karen’s full remarks can be seen here. (Unfortunately, you must have Real Player to watch the clip.) They can also be heard via podcast here.

Among the social entrepreneurs featured alongside Karen in the series, were Jed Emerson, Jacqueline Novogratz, and Dr. Paul Farmer. Many thanks to NYU and the Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship for putting together such a fantastic series.