Justice Defenders

A lack of meaningful access to justice impacts nearly two-out-of-three people worldwide, from Uganda to the US, which has the highest population of prisoners globally.

Many people are failed by their justice systems and unprotected by the law. But we’ve recently seen a shift in the narrative around criminal justice in America and around the world. There’s a global hunger for justice. As Justice Defenders, we’re scaling our model and building a movement around the idea that everyone deserves to tell their side of the story.

Winning the Elevate Prize would bring us closer to our goal of facilitating one million fair hearings for defenceless people by 2030. It would enable us to scale our digital legal education and practice to more defenceless communities. We would equip prison communities with technology—computers, wifi dongles, and hardware—for prisoners and prison staff to be virtually trained as paralegals and lawyers and attend online courts.

We would see more paralegals and law graduates (prisoners and prison staff) working inside these prisons to help others access justice. We would see many more people receiving fair sentences and released. We would see incarceration rates and unlawful imprisonment drop measurably at national levels.

I'm Alexander McLean, Founder and CEO of Justice Defenders. My journey began at 18, volunteering at a Ugandan hospital, seeing patients from the local prison, left to die, and buried unceremoniously. I saw prisoners that couldn’t afford lawyers and awaited trial for years, in degrading conditions.

I found that justice was all too often dependent on your income or the colour of your skin. The cost of being without justice is too great for those who are imprisoned without a fair hearing, wrongly sentenced due to a poorly prepared case, or simply forgotten behind bars. 

My vision for Justice Defenders remains the same as when I started it—to elevate all humans facing injustice. To work towards a world where everyone, regardless of background, receives a fair hearing. I dream of a day where no one is punished or imprisoned—and certainly not caned or executed—without telling their side of the story.

I hope for a world where we're equally accountable to the law and protected by it. We will scale our digitally delivered legal education and training to other communities and countries—to move our defenders from those who’ve been in conflict with the law to the ones shaping and implementing it.

10 million people are imprisoned globally, three million of whom are awaiting trial. It’s often said that justice delayed is justice denied. People awaiting trial languish in prison for three to eight years on average. The justice gap is rooted in systemic barriers that prevent prisoners from accessing justice. People in prison are typically at a disproportionate risk of conflict with the law by the nature of their social and economic status. In Kenya and Uganda, 60% of prisoners we serve are illiterate, and 90% cannot afford counsel.

Justice Defenders works to increase access to justice and fair trials. In prisons across Kenya and Uganda, we train prisoners and prison staff to become paralegals and lawyers, equipping them with legal skills and knowledge to assert their rights and represent themselves and others.

Prisoners study the law, learn how judicial systems work, and understand the nature of their cases. They learn to argue their case using the law and develop a clear course of action before their trial. Equipped with sufficient information from defendants themselves, judges can then discern all the facts in a case and deliver a fair ruling.

Justice Defenders’ model is a unique bottom-up approach to increasing access to justice. We are demonstrating a radical model of community capacity-building and urgent change within the criminal justice system. 

We do not rely on external legal professionals. We work with those who are in conflict with the law, who see the system from the inside out—those who feel outside of the law, unseen, and beyond its protection. Those with criminal justice experience are well placed to advise on criminal law, and even help shape the law to come. 

Justice Defenders would be unable to provide access to justice for defenceless people, if not for our prison communities driving change from within. We reinvent access to quality legal practice by enabling previously untapped potential—in prisoners and prison staff—with the necessary legal skills and knowledge. By co-creating the solution, we aim to restore agency to the very people who are most affected by the justice gap.

We work together as a community, building common cause between unlikely allies – creating bridges in justice systems that are adversarial and divisive.

We will scale our model to help bridge the justice gap.

Our legal training program can and has been used in various contexts. We’ve received requests to roll out in seven countries. Our scalability lies in a clearly defined model that we have fine-tuned over 10 years working in prisons.

We’ve served over 30,000 prisoners in individual case resolution, resulting in over 15,000 releases and 69 overturned death sentences. 39 prisoners and prison officers have graduated from the University of London law program, following in Nelson Mandela’s footsteps. 250 paralegals are working in our prison-based legal offices, preparing others for court. Since we launched our digital programs in 2020, we have virtually trained 87 new paralegals and facilitated 13,340 virtual courts.

Our model achieves a multiplier effect: training paralegals enables those individuals to flourish; they can then assist thousands of others, many of whom will represent themselves in court, obtain release, and return to their families sooner; training prison officers alongside prisoners has a profound effect on the prison environment; decongesting the prisons and clearing the backlog in courts results in a more efficient and fairer justice system.