by Vica Irani, Co-head of Jones Day’s Global Corporate Practice and Head of Diversity for the UK
We’re incredibly proud to be a supporter of GiveOut as part of our standing commitment to charitable and pro-bono efforts both here in the UK and around the world.
We have the pleasure of currently working with Njeri and the team at the National Gay Lesbian Human Rights Commission of Kenya. We’ve been working with them on some incredibly important strategic litigation efforts.
And I’ve been truly impressed by that commitment and dedication to the movement in Kenya and the significant impact that they’re able to have in so many areas with, I have to say, some pretty limited resources. We have been genuinely impressed and blown away by the work that they’ve done.
When we first started working with GiveOut, one of the things that really struck us at Jones Day is that many of the individuals working at the grant partners, are people who will in the future be viewed as true LGBT+ pioneers, maybe in the same way as the Harvey Milk’s or Martha Johnson’s of the US or the Lisa Powers’ of the UK.
And I’m not saying when they first told us this, we sort of assumed it was puffery. But I have to say, the more we’ve worked with them, the more we realise that it is so much more than that.
I did want to say just a couple of things about some of our pro-bono efforts and why we see it as such an important part of our commitment to the communities which we serve, both where we have offices and where we don’t. We’ve had a long history of pro-bono work, public service and community involvement across the world.
We do this through both financial support for organisations, through events like City for LGBT+ as well as through the work of our charitable foundation, but also importantly, through rolling up our sleeves and using the skills we have as a law firm to assist those who are facing injustice and empower those who are seeking to defend the interests of others across the world, and most importantly, advance the rule of law, which is one of the principal goals of our pro-bono initiatives.
It’s this final element that I want to briefly focus on as we see it particularly important for the LGBT+ movement and the protection of minority groups more generally. Now I appreciate that I’m a lawyer and so I would say this, but we honestly do see the rule of law as being critical to freedom and prosperity, both for businesses and society as a whole, but also particularly for those in marginalised groups who can otherwise be left exposed to short term or populist agendas that seek to pander to the majority at the expense of the minority.
When I was a child and perhaps it was naivety, I assumed that things would always get better, the world would always get fairer, life would always improve. We’ve seen in the last few years that’s not the case.
There are too many rule of law projects that we’ve had the privilege to be involved in to mention. But I’ll just touch on a couple of examples. A number of years ago, we established a permanent presence staffed by a rotating roster of Jones Day lawyers in Laredo, Texas, at the US southern border and the island of Lesbos to provide free representation to asylum seekers, including with specialist LGBT resources.
We’ve devoted many hundreds of attorney hours developing resources, documenting the rights of LGBT people to have their relationships legally recognised around the world. With these resources also being used importantly as a basis to advocate for change and reform in a number of countries.
And for many years we’ve engaged in the training and mentoring of judges, public defenders, attorneys and others in Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia to improve the administration of justice and institutionalised recognition of fundamental rights. And finally, here in the UK, one of our more significant projects is a global law exchange project at the Bingham Center for the Rule of Law, which focuses on access to justice, administrative justice and corruption in emerging economies.
The work of GiveOut demonstrates not just the importance, whatever small project we can support, but also the enormous scale of the challenge that lies ahead.