Millions of dollars have been frozen, in the last two weeks, by the US administration which will directly or indirectly affect current and future transitional justice projects.Behind the scenes, the long-term work conducted by NGOs on evidence-gathering, analysis, and victim support for accountability for international crimes has been decimated. And future initiatives are in jeopardy, like in Liberia where two sources described to Justice Info how a high-level delegation visiting Liberia in January for consultations on the War and Economic Crimes Court under discussion there was blindsided by the US aid freeze. “Everything may be lost,” said one member of the delegation who was not authorised to speak to the media.
This is just one example. The US plays an outsize role in the world of international justice, says former US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice Stephen Rapp [2009-2015] who explains there are multiple types of inter-related projects, well beyond USAID which “isn’t usually the biggest funder in this field”.
Beyond the shuttering of US development aid agency and of its 40 billion USD annual budget, which has garnered most of the headlines, the US State Department provides considerable grants to NGOs via its Democracy, Human Rights, and labour (DRL) programme. In addition, there are grants from the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement and multiple other programmes working with justice and law enforcement state systems across the globe. The US was “certainly the most important actor in this space,” says Rapp. Why? “It’s about strengthening the rule of law everywhere,” he says, as a way of shoring up US interests. “Atrocity crimes cause refugee flows,” he continues. “Venezuela causes this massive flow of immigrants through the Darien Gap into the United States. Efforts to prevent that, to work for regional solutions, to support international accountability for these regimes can eventually make it possible for them to transition. All of this helps us at the end of the day.”
War crimes justice hit in Ukraine
One immediate example is Ukraine, now reeling from US president Donald Trump’s decision to negotiate its future directly with Moscow. On the accountability front, Ukraine has opened more than 140,000 war crime cases since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. A Ukraine government document quoted by Reuters outlined that 89 million in justice funding is now at risk. For example, the work of close to 40 experts of the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine (ACA), previously working with counterparts in the Office of the Prosecutor General and providing expertise to the Ukrainian authorities, is now on hold.
There are currently attempts to challenge the aid freeze via US courts including from the American Bar Association (ABA), along with co-plaintiffs. On February 13, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order. But the effects of that order are not clear. In a message to the board of the ABA’s Rule of Law Initiative, Scott Carlson, the Associate Executive Director of the Center for Global Programs which has joined that suit, wrote that “the ‘pause’ of all U.S. foreign assistance with no prior notice to affected parties is unprecedented. From the ABA perspective, being forced unexpectedly, and without notice, to abrogate commitments with governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in dozens of countries constitutes damage to the ABA’s brand, which is direct, immediate, and foreseeable. Moreover, these U.S. Government actions have created an increasingly troubling security situation for foreign assistance personnel. Threats to our staff and partners are on the rise, as the perception grows that the current U.S. Government may be prepared to abruptly abandon them after years of dedicated service”.
A myriad of organizations affected
But small organisations have been hesitant to speak up. “I get a couple of emails a week asking if I want to join a lawsuit,” says Christy Fujio, the Executive Director of Synergy for Justice, a women-led NGO which supports survivor-centred organisations. “We all want someone to start lawsuits, everyone’s afraid to be named in a lawsuit.” In Washington DC many individuals are lobbying for waivers for their projects. But “you can’t really work on the waiver unless you’ve got people working in USAID to tell you what you can do. And none of those people are there. You can’t just turn it on and off like a spigot without the staff that supports it,” explains Rapp.
Rapp worries about the many local DRL-funded projects: “I was at a summit in Barcelona last year with people from about 15 different situations from Guinea to Latin America to Myanmar to Sri Lanka to all sorts of different places that were each funded by DRL - very much with a victim and survivor centred focus on the justice.” At the base of much of the work on accountability for international crimes are a myriad of organisations working within the affected communities. They are often subgrantees of the major aid organisations, and some of the smallest organisations working in conflict zones work grant to grant.
The scale of the devastation to the accountability world has not yet been assessed globally. “I’m getting constant communications from various groups that relied on exclusively US funding, and they are in a world of hurt. They have no funding, they can’t pay their employees, they can’t pay their bills,” says Rapp. He points out that USAID funding now frozen includes support for a civil society multi-year project on documentation in Ethiopia to engage on transitional justice for the 600,000 killed in the recent conflict.
The casualty count has only begun
At least one organisation in the Horn of Africa previously working with victims of violence has shuttered its website, along with another in South Sudan, neither of which wanted to be named, and a sub-office of a US organisation in Banjul providing embedded personnel into the Gambia Ministry of Justice has closed, according to Justice Info sources.
Every Casualty Counts has been working with community-based organisations on documenting victims of armed conflicts for 20 years. They now have 67 network members worldwide, hugely varying in size and capacity, “some of them have budgets of millions annually, some of them with purely volunteers or with a few thousand,” says Rachel Taylor the Executive Director. She estimates about a third of them have been hit, “many of them losing up to 80 % of income overnight. These are the people through the sub grants that USAID gives. These are the people who we work with who are literally putting their own lives and their family’s lives at risk every day to document atrocities. They work in very insecure environments. And now they have the added stress of not knowing whether they’re going to be able to feed their families”.
Most NGOs are not prepared to go on the record yet. Some hope that the decision is temporary and in fear of being singled out if they complain. The director of a Ukraine NGO tells Justice Info that the aid freeze meant a return to how it used to be before the massive influx of money and expertise into Ukraine after the full-scale invasion in 2022.
The shockwaves are unlikely to spare the International Criminal Court (ICC), as there are, as in Ukraine, lots of small groups that work on countries under ICC investigations whose budgets are partially or entirely funded by the US government and now need to suspend operations, perhaps indefinitely.
A Syrian NGO: “Just trying to survive”
Syria is another example. In December after the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime, prisons opened and documents from intelligence agencies became available. Millions of pages of information could provide clues to both the fates of the thousands of disappeared and identify those who may be held responsible.
The Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC) told Justice Info they had sent teams to Damascus where they obtained scans of some 400.000 pages of documents. “We went for the most important, missing persons detention-related files and for orders from commanders. Now we have those documents we need to analyse them, that will be laborious, and we don’t have the funds to do it,” explained Roger Lu Phillips, SJAC legal director. Half of their funds came from the US State Department. As a result, 70% of their staff had to be laid off and the remainder are on half-pay. “We are just trying to survive these three months,” said Phillips. “We continue to do the documentation work as a priority, [but] we cannot get by for so long. If the freeze goes on or the litigation takes too long SJAC’s future would be in doubt.”
Another survivor-centred organization that also did not want to be named says that “our entire Syria programme was funded by the US government. The money that would have gone to us and to partners is probably about two million dollars over the next two and a half years. And we’re very small”.
“The chain of custody of information and evidence is not something that you can just break and reinstall and break and reinstall. It does matter because the quality of the information will be lost or degraded to an extent that it would no longer be admissible in court,” says Taylor, from Every Casualty Counts. “We share evidence with the UN’s International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism who then shares it with case builders in Europe,” confirms Fujio from Synergy for Justice. “I worry about universal jurisdiction cases moving forward in the European Union.”
Taylor also worries about what can happen to sensitive information: “All of the people who have information stored in databases about war crimes and identities of witnesses and things like that, if they can no longer pay overnight their security software subscriptions, what happens to all of that information? The wrong people could get hold of it and lives would be lost.”
Colombia: 2% cut for the JEP
In Colombia, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) stands to lose between 3.6 and 3.8 million USD this year as a result of the US freeze, its new chairman Alejandro Ramelli confirmed. This includes money from four projects funded by USAID and two by the US State Department, amounting to approximately 2% of its annual budget. That funding loss could mean that the JEP, the judicial arm of the transitional justice system stemming from the 2016 peace deal with the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, may struggle to advance on investigating and prosecuting two of its most recently opened macro cases, Justice Ramelli warned. One of them focuses on sexual violence and the other on crimes committed against indigenous and Afro-Colombian minorities. That money was being spent primarily, he explained, on logistics to enable the participation of thousands of victims and provide them with psychosocial support.
Ramelli went even further, saying that "without that money, it will not be possible to investigate the FARC". These words, however, were quickly attacked by politicians long opposed to transitional justice in Colombia. “Since its creation, the JEP has received 3.4 trillion pesos [about 825 million dollars] from the general budget and will receive 737 billion this year. And yet the JEP’s chairman now tells us that because of the 16 billion they will not receive from USAID they won’t be able to judge FARC?,” Senator Paloma Valencia said.
“Grants will come back…”
For many organisations, the biggest issue is the shock of the immediacy of the freeze: “You just never expect something like this is going to happen. It’s definitely shocking,” said Fujio. And there is still confusion about what happens next. Another head of a US organisation who did not want to be named told Justice Info that “at the State Department, they are reviewing tranches of grants, and some groups have already received notifications that their grants will come back.”
But there is a question over whether aid projects will be examined through the anti-diversity-equity-inclusion lens that is reportedly being applied by the new US administration to science projects. And whether that would mean that projects focused on - for example - women or girls or disadvantaged or marginalised groups would be acceptable. “We did learn that our transitional justice project, which was women’s empowerment, is sort of tentatively scheduled for termination,” says Fujio.
Some of those consulted by Justice Info also have concerns over what kinds of parameters Washington may set for any aid granted in the future. “I do think there’s a real question now about the politicisation of these funds,” says one US-based director of an accountability organisation who did not want to be named. “We’re entering a new concerning territory. I think many groups will probably not want to get US government funding moving forward because of the fear of what that could mean if they would be required to hew closely to the foreign policy objectives of the Trump administration,” adds this source.
No time for the ecosystem to adapt
As for replacing the US funding with new grants from the rest of the world, no one of the dozen of transitional justice leading actors that Justice Info spoke with is sanguine that other governments or philanthropic will step up. “There’s not a lot of government funding available in this space. And philanthropy has fallen off for these efforts,” comments Rapp.
“The US is part of the core political and financial support of these internationalized courts,” says Martin Petrov, a consultant helping to design hybrid mechanisms. “I don’t think most people realise the huge impact of US technical and financial support that enables conflict-torn countries to establish accountability mechanisms and deal with their past.” One such example is the Special Tribunal for The Gambia which was approved by ECOWAS heads of state just last December after years of work. Petrov says that much of that work has “largely been possible due to the support of the US expertise and funding,” and that it would be difficult to imagine how the project would continue if the US pulls out. “By definition, hybrid courts require international participation. That’s how they work. I have noticed that if both the US and the EU support a court, along with other donors, the court will work. If one of them is not on board, then it won’t,” he says.
“If that had been a phased-out approach, it would have been difficult for a lot of organisations, but things would have survived,” adds Taylor. “It’s like when the financial crash happened. When suddenly you take out one big player in the ecosystem, then everything else falls apart. If you knew that was coming, if it happened gradually, the ecosystem adapts. But because this was literally overnight and so big, it’s not possible to adjust.”
