International Bridges to Justice Expands Legal Access

SAN MARCOS, California — More than 10 million people are behind bars worldwide, and a disproportionate share never speak to a lawyer before heading to prison. International Bridges to Justice (IBJ) works to close that gap by building sustainable and quality criminal legal systems that turn rights on paper into rights in practice. The Borgen Project spoke with Sanjeewa Liyanage, director of international programs at IBJ Geneva, regarding the organization’s 25 years of effort to make legal protection a reality for the most vulnerable people around the world.

Laws on Paper, Gaps in Practice

IBJ was founded on a belief that Liyanage articulates: “Every man, woman and child should have access to a competent lawyer at the earliest possible time.” Most countries have guarantees of that right in writing, but the gap exists between the guarantee and the actual implementation. “The laws are there, the gap is between the law and the institutional implementation. And the defense lawyers are the bridge,” Liyanage said.

The effects of that gap are visible in the region’s prisons. In Cambodia, the rights group LICADHO reports that 18 of the 19 prisons it monitors exceed their official capacity11 of those run at 200% of capacity or higher, with one facility, Kandal Prison, holding more than 650%, and roughly three-quarters of the people held in those facilities are in pretrial detention—meaning they are awaiting trial, not that they have been found guilty or are known to be innocent.

In Burundi, prison monitors have found the population running at roughly 2.6 times designed capacity, with more than half of those detained held on remand awaiting trial. “There’s a whole nexus between poverty and detention, a lot of people who are detained or convicted are the poor,” Liyanage said. IBJ focuses on the populations that are most affected: the poor, minorities, migrants, women and LGBTQ+ individuals in countries where pretrial detention without a lawyer has become the norm.

From Pilots to Policy

IBJ works to build criminal legal aid systems that give every woman, man and child access to a lawyer from the earliest stages of a case. It also works with justice institutions to reform policies and practices that prevent people from exercising that right. Through pilot projects, IBJ shows what can work in practice, then advocates for successful approaches to be adopted nationally.

“For us, success is systemic change,” Liyanage told the Borgen Project. “It is not individual case numbers that are our success metric, but outcomes of our action.” This approach has produced documented policy change in China, where IBJ has worked for nearly 25 years.

IBJ documents that juvenile-justice reforms it advocated for were incorporated into China’s 2012 revision of the Criminal Procedure Law, including a requirement that a trusted “appropriate adult”—a family member, teacher or social worker—be present when police question a minor, and provisions expanding a juvenile’s access to a defense lawyer.

A separate 2013 revision to the same law added record-sealing protections: young people convicted of an offense committed before age 18 and sentenced to less than five years no longer carry that record into adulthood, addressing what Liyanage called a critical gap for young people in conflict with the law: “If you do a crime below the age of 18, when you reach 18, your record is sealed, it does not follow you anywhere.” IBJ also says a duty-lawyer pilot that Liyanage dates to 2006—stationing attorneys at police stations so any detainee, regardless of income, could reach a lawyer before trial—helped demonstrate the model behind a nationwide duty-lawyer scheme that China wrote into the Criminal Procedure Law in 2018.

The Situation in Cambodia

In Cambodia, the transformation has run even deeper. After the Khmer Rouge left fewer than 20 lawyers in the entire country, defense counsel was effectively absent from courts for years. IBJ built legal aid centers across eight provinces and trained hundreds of defense lawyers. IBJ says that model helped shape a national criminal legal aid program the Bar Association of Cambodia later established, with support from the Ministry of Justice, for people facing felony charges.

Liyanage points to the courts as the clearest sign of that shift. He recalled a judge in one province complaining that a lawyer kept missing hearings—not from negligence, but because IBJ had only one lawyer covering both the courtroom and the prison, where she also had to interview clients. Liyanage said he took the complaint as a good sign: it meant courts now expected a lawyer to be there, and IBJ’s response was to add more lawyers rather than fewer. Courts that once excluded defense lawyers altogether now depend on them even before trial proceedings.

The Situation in Indonesia

In Indonesia, IBJ has spent years working alongside women legal defenders navigating a legal system that Human Rights Watch says disadvantages women. HRW documents that Indonesia’s 2022 national criminal code criminalizes sex outside marriage and cohabitation without marriage, and criminalizes women who obtain abortions except in cases of rape or medical emergency, while warning that the code’s recognition of local customary law could entrench hundreds of existing discriminatory local regulations, including curfews for women, mandatory hijab rules and rules mandating female genital mutilation. IBJ-trained women defenders have provided legal protection to more than 2,000 women, most of whom were victims of domestic violence, including sexual violence, but were later charged with crimes themselves.

On the Ground in Crisis

IBJ has continued providing legal assistance during periods of political crisis and conflict. During Burundi’s 2015 political crisis, thousands of young protesters were arrested after President Pierre Nkurunziza announced he would seek a third term—a bid that opposition parties and international observers said violated Burundi’s constitutional term limits and the Arusha peace accords, though the country’s Constitutional Court ultimately ruled it legal. Most international and local NGOs were forced out of the country, but IBJ stayed. Its lawyers worked under direct threat from military authorities. “Our lawyers were not taking any political side of the government or the protesters,” Liyanage recalled. “We are taking the side of the law, the Burundian law that protects its citizens’ basic legal rights that include access to counsel.” Liyanage says that through consistent legal intervention, IBJ’s lawyers secured the release of more than 700 people.

After Myanmar’s military coup in February 2021, IBJ’s five in-country justice centers and 40 staff became a key legal resource for detainees, according to Liyanage. “Our lawyers in Myanmar were the only link to most detainees and their families,” he said, since families were not allowed to visit. Lawyers carried letters and medicine into detention centers and relayed information back to relatives, in addition to defending detainees’ legal rights. Liyanage says that in one case, IBJ lawyers negotiated the release of 80 to 90 people held at a military camp. He said the work carried real risk: some of IBJ’s lawyers went into hiding with their children but kept working.

The Long View

To this day, IBJ’s lawyers have delivered legal protection to more than 500,000 people across 53 countries, while their rights awareness campaigns have reached more than 70 million people. Yet Sanjeewa Liyanage is direct about what makes those numbers truly matter. “Changing the justice system, the way they work, needs a long term investment of time, a long term investment of resources and long term commitment,” he told The Borgen Project. The reforms in China and Burundi required a decade and a half of persistent effort. “Working for two to three years on one system is not helpful,” he said.

Liyanage describes the long-term goal as a justice system in which legal protections are available from the earliest stages of a case.

Justice in Practice

IBJ’s work shows that closing the gap between written law and actual reality requires more than awareness—it needs lawyers to show up, over years, even when doing so carries risk. From Cambodia to China to Burundi to Myanmar, the results are measurable: courts that wait for lawyers, prisons that open their doors and hundreds of people who are released, according to IBJ. For the world’s most vulnerable, access to legal defense and aid is often the difference between justice and its absence.

– Saakshi Bhat