Law Should Serve All People, Not Just the Powerful

It’s one of the cruelest recent practices of the Trump administration: deporting people to third countries that they have no connection to, where they often face grave danger.

The Open Society Justice Initiative is collaborating with partners in several countries to challenge the practice in court. In a recent instance, a legal filing forced a country receiving deportees to respond within hours with a pledge that it would not send them to any other place where they were at risk of harm. We continue working to stop the removals.

Law should be a tool for justice. But in today’s world, we see law being used to accentuate inequalities and erode democracy. We also see international norms meant to prevent violence and aggression openly ignored or breached.

The Justice Initiative was created to respond to these problems. Courts generally don’t act on their own; they answer questions put before them. Which makes it essential to bring important causes before judges in the right form and at the right moment. That’s why we practice strategic litigation, which combines legal action and advocacy to bring about systemic change.

For more than two decades, we’ve built cases to improve the lives of marginalized individuals and communities around the world. We’ve launched cases ourselves and provided financing, technical, and strategic advice to our many courageous partners to stand up for people facing injustice. We’ve worked to strengthen the ecosystem of strategic litigation by supporting cases that become models and building connections among civil society litigators working within and across borders.

A few examples:

In 1999, Roma children in the Czech Republic were 27 times more likely than non-Roma children to be placed in “special schools” for the mentally disabled. Even Roma children who avoided the special schools mostly landed in substandard, predominantly Roma schools. We joined with the European Roma Rights Centre to challenge this segregation in the European Court of Human Rights. That ultimately resulted in a 2007 landmark decision outlawing racial segregation and discrimination in the provision of education across the continent.

A major case might start with a simple commute to work. In 2015, when Zurich police stopped Mohamed Wa Baile at the city’s train station and demanded his papers—the police report noted his skin color—he challenged the stop, and we intervened on his behalf before the European Court of Human Rights. In 2024, the court unanimously found that Switzerland had violated his rights. It was the clearest declaration by the court that a police stop grounded in racial stereotypes could itself be an act of racial discrimination—a ruling that now guides law enforcement across Europe.

The Justice Initiative has also helped bring the climate crisis before the world’s highest courts. We supported several African states’ submissions to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which in 2024 issued the first international judicial opinion on states’ climate obligations; and to the International Court of Justice, whose July 2025 advisory opinion found in no uncertain terms that states must address climate harm.

Our challenge is to reimagine international law in a way that connects not just to diplomats and lawyers, but to all people. Law shapes everything from whether workers can walk off the job to the air people breathe. I saw its importance when I apprenticed with public interest lawyers as a student in apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. While law had its limits, it made a distinct if modest contribution alongside the extraordinary community mobilization and international isolation that helped bring about a transition to democracy.

Our privilege at the Justice Initiative is to help people use legal tools in their struggles for dignity, justice, and rights. It’s critical that those tools—and how they are used—are chosen by communities themselves. Some of their challenges will be answered in days. Others may take decades. Our job is to stand with people for as long as it takes.