TrialWatch Partners

TrialWatch partners with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Microsoft, the American Bar Association, Columbia Law School, and a host of law firms and law clinics around the world.  We collaborate with our partners – leads in the world of law, technology, and human rights – to expose abuse, monitor trials, and advocate for individual freedom and legal reform.

Our central mission is to expose injustice around the world.  CFJ’s partner, the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights, monitors and reports on trials as part of TrialWatch, expanding our geographic reach.

In order to engage in advocacy in each case where this is needed, TrialWatch works with law firms, including Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, Covington & Burling LLP, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, and Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, among others.  With these firms, we have:

• Produced Fairness Reports (such as the Report on the trial of Russian journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva, who was convicted of ‘justification of terrorism’);
• Submitted amicus briefs to local courts in support of those convicted in unfair trials (such the amicus brief urging an appellate court to overturn the conviction of Gulzhan Pasanova, a domestic violence survivor in Kyrgyzstan); and
• Filed communications with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on behalf of those unjustly imprisoned (such as Cameroonian journalist Paul Chouta, who has spent nearly two years in detention while speech-related charges remain pending against him).

We also work with a network of law clinics around the world to partner with next-generation lawyers and foster local ownership and systemic change.

In the United States we work with Columbia Law School, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, New York University School of Law, University of Southern California Law School and Stanford Law School. Columbia Law School also acts as a hub to facilitate collaboration with law school clinics around the world, including in Brazil, the Netherlands, Poland and Lebanon.

Systemic change means working with the next generation of innovators.  Students working with TrialWatch have monitored trials, written reports, tested new technology, and worked with other university students around the globe on TrialWatch projects.  The Human Rights Clinic & Institute at Columbia Law School—TrialWatch’s inaugural academic partner—plays a convening role for this growing global community of university partners and helps to train them.  Our current partners include:

• Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Clinic & Institute (US)
• Chiang Mai University Faculty of Law (Thailand)
• LaSagesse University (Lebanon)
• University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Law School (The Netherlands)
• University of Southern California Gould School of Law, International Human Rights Clinic (US)
• Jagiellonian University (Poland)
• Universidade do São Paulo (Brazil)

We also partnered with Microsoft to create the custom TrialWatch app, an innovative mobile application.  The app distills the information needed to make an assessment of a trial’s fairness and allows a monitor to capture audio and textual data in the palm of their hand.  This technology permits us to take a data-driven approach to grading and comparing trials.