Waging Justice
Our Story
We founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice because we believe in creating a world where human rights are protected and no one is above the law. We believe that justice, like war, must be waged; it doesn’t just happen on its own. So we gather evidence of mass human rights abuses, provide free legal support to victims and work to ensure that perpetrators are held to account.
The fight for justice has some difficult foes and that we are staring down some alarming global trends. Since it was founded CFJ has grown every year, and we now operate in more than 40 countries. We are actively investigating war crimes in Ukraine, monitoring sham trials targeting women and journalists, and fighting back against a global trend of authoritarianism that seeks to punish those who speak truth to power.
We founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice to hold perpetrators of mass atrocities accountable for their crimes, and to help victims in their fight for justice.
Amal and George Clooney
For many of the causes we take on, it can be years before we see a clear path to justice – but CFJ continues to work on issues that have long faded from the headlines. This includes representing Yazidi women who were raped and enslaved by ISIS, supporting survivors of atrocities in Congo and Sudan, and battling the epidemic of discrimination and violence against women and girls worldwide.
We are in the fight for justice it for the long haul, no matter how difficult the journey.
Our Initiatives
At CFJ, we provide free legal support to victims of abuses of power. Each of our programs aims to fight systemic injustice against vulnerable communities: journalists, women and girls, democracy-defenders, LGBTQ persons and minorities.
When journalists are locked up just for doing their job, we try to get them out of prison.
Our TrialWatch program monitors criminal trials in over 40 countries by placing individuals who are trained using our TrialWatch app in courtrooms across the globe. The world’s leading legal experts use the data gathered by these monitors to grade the trials and expose those that are a sham. We then work with local lawyers to free those who are unjustly imprisoned. And we are building Global Justice Rankings to expose countries’ performance and advocate for systemic change.
When minorities are targeted for genocide, we help to trigger trials against the perpetrators.
Our Docket program gathers evidence of war crimes and genocide, from Ukraine to the Congo, Darfur, to Venezuela and Iraq, shares it with prosecutors, and represents survivors in trials once perpetrators are in the dock.
When young girls are denied the right to study, work, or marry when they want, we help them fight for their rights through the courts.
Our Waging Justice for Women initiative works hand-in-hand with young women in Africa to pursue their rights through the courts and run ‘women for women’ legal aid clinics that provide free legal support to women and girls who are victims of discrimination.
