Peace, justice and strong institutions

 Target   Case studies

End abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence against and

torture of children.

To improve the treatment of trafficked and abused child witnesses in Cambodia, we researched child witness protection measures adopted in nine jurisdictions including Hong Kong, UK, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia, for abuse-survivors’ NGO  Hagar International. Issues and topics reviewed included procedures to prepare children before trial, the appointment of support persons for child victims, and the availability of guidelines for judges and prosecutors on questioning children. This work has resulted in a toolkit for Cambodian lawyers and other child advocates supporting child victims who participate in legal proceedings, and a series of “train the trainer” seminars for lawyers case managers, psychologists, counsellors and other advocates.

 

We work with eyeWitness to Atrocities to help facilitate justice for international human rights violations. eyeWitness has created an app that can be used to capture images and video footage of human rights violations and atrocity crimes around the world, with data being sent from locations including Latin America, Europe, Africa, South-East Asia and the Middle East. The app verifies the authenticity of the footage and creates an electronic chain of custody, sending it back to eyeWitness where it can be analysed and objectively described by volunteer lawyers from firms such as Linklaters. Lawyers help eyeWitness to review every image and video they receive, to ensure that it meets the legal requirements to be used as evidence across judicial processes.

Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure

equal access to justice for all.

Members of the Liberian judiciary now have easier access to previous judgments to ensure a consistently applied rule of law, after we took on the huge undertaking to summarise and index over 10,000 cases in Liberia’s legal history after civil war left the legal system in the country severely damaged.

 

In the U.S. it is unconstitutional to execute prisoners who have an intellectual disability, but the tests for establishing whether someone has an intellectual disability vary between states. Over 60 of our lawyers from 14 offices were instrumental in securing a U.S. Supreme Court victory in April 2017 for Bobby Moore, a 57-year-old man with intellectual disabilities, who has been held on death row in Texas for more than 35 years. Based on research across 25 jurisdictions and four international courts, we submitted an amicus curiae brief in relation to Mr Moore’s appeal on behalf of a number of leading international medical institutes and organisations, including the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the World Psychiatric Association.  The Supreme Court found that the test applied by the Texas Criminal Appeals Court for determining which defendants are intellectually disabled in capital cases violated the U.S. constitution.