PILnet’s Global Awards celebrate and honor the extraordinary efforts made by you and your peers to strengthen civil society, advance social change, and protect the public interest. This year, PILnet welcomed an impressive array of nominations from across the world for our two awards: the PILnet Global Partnership and Local Impact Awards.
We are excited to announce this year’s shortlisted projects for these two categories. These ten inspiring projects below show how pro bono can be used to address today’s most pressing issues and help those who are most in need.
The winner of each category will be decided by an external committee of judges and will be announced at the 2024 Global Awards Dinner in Bangkok on November 14th.
This year, PILnet will also be giving an additional award to one of the shortlisted projects: the Popular Choice Pro Bono Award. The winner of this award will be chosen by Forum participants, who will have the opportunity to vote on the shortlisted projects through the Whova App prior to and during the Forum.
Congratulations to those shortlisted and thank you to all those who submitted nominations!
African Orphan Crops Consortium (Morrison Foerster)
The African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC) is a collaboration among nonprofits, governments, and private industry dedicated to the development of orphan crops. “Orphan” crops are those that attract little interest from the agribusiness sector because they typically are not traded internationally, but play an important role in regional food security. The AOCC supports research to enhance the resilience and nutritional value of these crops and conducts a training program for crop improvement scientists, dubbed the African Plant Breeding Academy.
Morrison Foerster partners with AOCC through pro bono support, leveraging their intellectual property and regulatory expertise to aid the Academy. Their legal guidance is crucial in helping scientists understand the framework for gene-edited plants, including intellectual property protection and regulatory approval in various African jurisdictions. Morrison Foerster lawyers have researched and summarized relevant laws, and presented the Academy’s first course on CRISPR (a gene editing technique) in Nairobi in 2023 at the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry. They also continue to support an ongoing series of workshops led by UC Davis, The African Union’s Development Agency-New Partnership for African Development, and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture. By assisting scientists, regulators, and officials in understanding these technologies, Morrison Foerster is helping advance food security and nutrition in Africa through gene-editing innovations.
Cross-Border Anti Human Trafficking: Essex39 Case (Hogan Lovells and Pacific Links Foundation)
Thirty-nine Vietnamese migrants tragically lost their lives in a refrigerated lorry container while being transported from Vietnam, through France and Belgium to the UK. Hogan Lovells, with the support and advice of their international legal anti-trafficking practice across four offices, provided pro bono support to their client, Pacific Links Foundation, in representing the victims’ families in their fight for reparations.
Hogan Lovells represented Vietnamese families who were bereaved as a result of the actions of the human traffickers in this transnational crime. Without the pro bono advice of the firm, the families would not have been able to be party to the criminal prosecution, and importantly, also the financial investigation into the convicted perpetrator’s assets in each country: the UK, Belgium and France. Whilst law enforcement focused on securing convictions, they initially overlooked the victims’ rights to reparations and failed to recognize trafficking as a violent crime deserving compensation. Through the efforts of Hogan Lovells’ Vietnam office, witness statements and claims from rural families were gathered and submitted to law enforcement, ensuring their rightful participation in the compensation process and attaining justice.
JWB Legal Mentorship Programmes (Justice Without Borders in partnership with seven law firms in Hong Kong, including Clifford Chance, RPC, Simmons & Simmons, and Skadden, nine law firms in Singapore, including Clifford Chance, Reed Smith, and RPC, 5 law firms in Indonesia, including Ginting & Reksodiputro (in association with A&O Shearman), Widyawan & Partners (in association with Linklaters), Hiswara Bunjamin & Tandjung (in association with Herbert Smith Freehills), TNB & Partners (in association with Norton Rose Fulbright Australia) and Rifdaan Novarazka & Prabowo Law Firm)
Justice Without Borders (JWB) implemented three capacity-building mentorship programs across its offices in Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Singapore between October 2023 and August 2024. These programs, lasting four to ten months, aimed to support victims of labor exploitation in seeking compensation from their abusers. JWB facilitated workshops and activities where pro bono lawyers collaborated with frontline workers, creating a deep and long-lasting bond between mentees and mentors. The trainings combined theoretical sessions and practical workshops, featuring speakers from law firms with specialist knowledge in areas of the law in the local jurisdiction, as well as representatives from organizations such as UN Women and government stakeholders, e.g. the Migrant Workers’ Protection and Placement Agency and the Ministry of Manpower (both in Indonesia).
Volunteer lawyers from JWB law firm partners also provided their mentees with hands-on support in managing legal cases including: drafting, collecting evidence, police report accompaniment, liaising with government agencies, and providing continuous legal advice and representation. This direct involvement has been crucial in ensuring that migrant domestic workers receive the necessary support to pursue their legal claims, even in the face of challenges like time delays and lack of documentation. Mentors also provided support through strategic legal research and impact litigation.
Kenyan Death Penalty Resentencing Project (Reprieve, Linklaters LLP and Lineal)
The Kenyan Death Penalty Resentencing Project facilitates access to justice for Kenyan prisoners eligible for resentencing, and has helped secure life-changing case outcomes for individuals. Following the Kenyan President’s 2023 decision to commute all death sentences imposed before November 2022 to life imprisonment, the project emphasizes the need for principled and individualized resentencing. In 2024, resentencing litigation supported by Reprieve and Linklaters secondees and the local counsel resulted in the release of a prisoner who had served over 30 years whose medical condition, which was not considered during his original sentencing, warranted a reassessment pending a mental health evaluation.
The project’s innovative case tracking platform has helped identify key trends in resentencing jurisprudence, informing training and resources for local legal practitioners. These efforts contributed to the creation of new sentencing guidelines, published by the Chief Justice of Kenya in 2023. The project’s learnings and scalable framework for sentencing reform is being considered for replication across East Africa and has already influenced Reprieve’s work in Malaysia, where the mandatory death penalty was abolished in 2023. Reprieve are also exploring rolling out the database to their work in Indonesia.
US$35M Indonesia Debt-For-Nature Swap (White & Case and Conservation International)
White & Case, working pro bono, advised Conservation International on the signing of a groundbreaking debt-for-nature swap on July 3, 2024 involving the United States, Indonesia, and other leading environmental non-governmental organizations. The agreement will redirect US $35million of Indonesia’s debt into an investment in coral reef conservation over the next nine years. This groundbreaking deal is the fourth agreement with Indonesia under the Tropical Forest Conservation Act, reauthorized in 2019 as the Tropical Forest and Coral Reef Conservation Act, and is the first to focus primarily on protecting coral ecosystems, marking a pivotal step in efforts to safeguard the biodiversity of one of the world’s most vibrant marine environments.
An oversight committee, composed of representatives from the Indonesian and US governments, NGO partners, and other civil society organizations will manage the funds. The conservation efforts will focus on Lesser-Sunda, Banda, and Bird’s Head Seascapes, prioritizing the protection of globally threatened or endemic species that depend on coral reef ecosystems for critical habitat. Activities will aim to promote sustainable biodiversity use, enhance connectivity between coral reef areas, and contribute to the improved management of existing public, private, municipal, or communal protected areas, with the goal of conserving high-value coral reef ecosystems and creating new protected areas where necessary.
Community Lawyering in Singapore (Pro Bono SG)
Responding to a lack of legal support for those ineligible for national legal aid in Singapore, Pro Bono SG launched a groundbreaking community lawyering initiative, the Community Law Centres, starting with the Community Law Centre @ Tian De Temple on January 31, 2023. This innovative model represents a paradigm shift in pro bono legal services delivery, leveraging non-traditional partnerships to bring access to justice directly into underserved communities.
Community Law Centres are hosted by non-legal partners deeply embedded in local communities, such as a Taoist temple, a traditional Chinese medicine charity, and a family services center. By situating centers in public housing neighborhoods rather than the central business district, the initiative dramatically improves accessibility for those facing financial, mobility, or technological barriers. The centers foster strong ties with local social service agencies, enabling lawyers and social workers to collaborate closely. This collective impact model represents a scalable, sustainable approach to community-based access to justice, reimagining how legal services can be integrated into the support system fabric for vulnerable communities.
LFAA Summit and Police Misconduct Database (Law Firm Antiracism Alliance)
Law Firm Antiracism Alliance (LFAA) was created by a small group of pro bono lawyers in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Amidst a nationwide antiracism movement, LFAA (with over 300 Alliance Firms) was created to help dismantle systemic racism in the law, and focuses on three pillars: ramping up antiracist pro bono work, convening and educating law firm lawyers and professionals about antiracism, and creating a database of research that advocates around the country could use.
LFAA has worked with small nonprofits throughout the United States, and in the past year has also begun collaborating with some of the most prominent US civil rights organizations. At the request of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, LFAA filed an amicus brief (written by Dentons) in the United States Supreme Court’s affirmative action appeal, supporting affirmative action in higher education. The LFAA Police Brutality Database is just one example of LFAA’s pro bono work. The project, with the Truth Hope and Justice Initiative, involved volunteers from over 20 law firms who cataloged every police brutality verdict and settlement over the past 20 years in Chicago and Philadelphia. This large project was overseen by Ropes & Gray. For the Philadelphia part of the project, LFAA firms were joined by the in-house department at Aon.
Protecting refugees from unlawful deportation (Norton Rose Fulbright South Africa Inc, Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town)
The Norton Rose Fulbright Impact Litigation team, representing the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town, successfully brought a challenge to the Refugees Act and regulations in South Africa.
The act allowed the Department of Home Affairs to treat refugees as illegal if they failed to renew their asylum seeker visas within 30 days of expiry. Despite the myriad challenges to renewing an asylum seeker visa, including poor state administration, lack of administrative capacity, and corruption within the Department of Home Affairs, asylum seekers who failed to renew on time were deemed to have abandoned their application for asylum and could be deported.
The Constitutional Court agreed with the arguments advanced on behalf of Scalabrini that the provisions were contrary to South Africa’s international law obligations (particularly the customary international law principle of non-refoulment) and were irrational and arbitrary in that they did not seek to achieve a legitimate government purpose.
Protecting Guatemalan children in prison (Colectivo Artesana, Vance Center for International Justice, White & Case)
Guatemala has one of highest rates of mother-child incarceration in Latin America, with victimless children and adolescents held behind bars with their imprisoned mothers, often under appalling, inhumane conditions. Guatemalan NGO Colectivo Artesana has been litigating these issues for years, and won certain protections for the children of incarcerated mothers during the pandemic under a court-approved national protocol. However, beginning in 2022, the Guatemalan courts began removing and undermining those protections, stigmatizing the imprisoned mothers, and placing responsibility on them rather than on the State for the human-rights violations their children were suffering.
White & Case joined the fight in 2023 to help evaluate whether local remedies had been exhausted, conduct extensive international comparative research, and then bring an action against Guatemala and other Guatemalan governmental entities at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) demanding provisional protective measures for these children. The team consisted of partners and associates from White & Case’s Mexico City office.
The work resulted in the Guatemalan Court for Children and Adolescents of the Metropolitan Area addressing these issues, providing major relief to the scores of children and adolescents of imprisoned mothers in Guatemala. Their action at the IACHR is still pending and, if successful, will set a precedent applicable well beyond Guatemala to protect this extremely vulnerable population.
Irish Legal and NGO Communities Unite to Support Ukrainian People (Helping Irish Hosts, Irish Red Cross, Irish Women Lawyers Association, Maya Krushlova (Filgarden), Public Interest Law Alliance, The Bar of Ireland, The Law Society of Ireland, the Bar Council, and the Ukraine Ireland Legal Alliance (UILA). In addition, law firms A&L Goodbody LLP, Arthur Cox LLP, DLA Piper LLP, Mason Hayes & Curran LLP, Matheson LLP, McCann Fitzgerald LLP and O’Sullivan Kenny LLP)
Displaced Ukrainians face significant challenges navigating the legal system in a new environment and are in urgent need of free legal advice on various matters such as immigration, employment, and housing. The key objective of this collaboration is to identify the legal needs of the Ukrainian community in Ireland and to provide them with free legal information, support, and advice in the areas where most queries arise. Services are provided in English and Ukrainian to ensure no individuals are excluded due to language barriers.
To assist displaced Ukrainians, this collaboration developed numerous legal clinics. This included a partnership with the Irish Red Cross, in which law firms provided a series of legal information clinics in the Ukraine Community Centre in Dublin. These clinics were held bi-weekly and covered a range of queries including immigration, housing, family law, and starting a business. In addition, to support Ukrainian lawyers seeking to practice in Ireland, this collaboration organized two networking events hosted by the Law Society of Ireland. Over 100 Ukrainian lawyers attended these events, which fostered collaboration and networking between the Irish and Ukrainian lawyers.