Dear Friends,
A few weeks ago, we shared our 2025 Annual Report. We wanted to come back with a few of the stories that didn’t fit in the headline numbers.
In Guatemala, ten years ago, PJI supported the landmark Sepur Zarco case: the first conviction in any national court for sexual slavery as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. The women who survived and testified there, who once hid their faces in the courtroom and then lifted them, now mentor survivors in the cases that follow. The torch is being passed on. They are the godmothers of justice.
Last year, after a pandemic-era pause, our team returned to Guatemala to accompany victim lawyers in the Military Diary case and others; one partner told us they could see the difference in survivor statements taken before and after PJI’s accompaniment: more detailed, more complete, more likely to hold up in court.
Accountability took other forms too.
In Sri Lanka, years of painstaking legal work by our partner, the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), culminated in March 2025, when the UK announced sanctions against four former military commanders. PJI provided ITJP with legal expertise for their submission to the UK Foreign Office, particularly on the evidence of conflict-related sexual violence as an international crime, and we co-signed the submission with them.
In the U.S., we filed a brief in Cisco Systems v. Doe I in support of the victims, who argued that Cisco could be held accountable for participating in atrocity crimes. In June 2026, the Supreme Court closed the courthouse doors in the victims’ faces, ruling 6-3 that U.S. law does not allow these claims to be brought at all. It is a real setback, and one more reason this work isn’t yet finished.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than seven million people remain internally displaced, PJI Co-Executive Director Maxine Marcus was appointed Commissioner on the UN’s Independent Commission of Inquiry. The Commission’s mandate covers some of the most widespread and systematic conflict-related sexual violence documented anywhere in the world today, and its findings — to be presented to the Human Rights Council in early 2027 — will draw concentrated global attention to a crisis that has gone without adequate accountability for far too long. We are fully supporting the Commission’s mandate.
None of this happens without people like you, who fund the quiet, behind-the-scenes work of building cases that can actually hold up in court.
With deepest gratitude,
Kathy Roberts and Max Marcus
Co-Founders, Partners in Justice International
