The Lawyer Who Went to Rwanda
In 1994, Gary Haugen was a young attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice when he was deployed to Rwanda as the director of the United Nations investigation into the genocide. He spent months documenting the systematic murder of over 800,000 people. The experience shattered every assumption he held about the world.
What haunted Haugen most was not the scale of the violence but the failure of the international community to intervene. The legal infrastructure existed. The moral obligation was clear. And still, ordinary people were slaughtered while the world watched. He returned to Washington with a question that would define his life: what good are laws if no one enforces them for the poor?
Building IJM
In 1997, Haugen founded International Justice Mission with a small team and a radical premise — that the global poor needed lawyers, investigators, and aftercare workers the same way they needed food, medicine, and clean water. IJM would not just advocate for policy change from a distance. It would go into the field, partner with local law enforcement, and pursue individual cases of abuse.
Their early work focused on bonded labour in South Asia, sex trafficking in Southeast Asia, and police brutality in Latin America. The approach was hands-on and dangerous — undercover investigations, coordinated rescue operations, and years-long legal proceedings to hold perpetrators accountable.
The Impact
By 2024, IJM had helped rescue over 100,000 people from violence and exploitation across thirty countries. More importantly, the organisation had demonstrated that systemic change was possible. In communities where IJM partnered with local authorities over sustained periods, trafficking prevalence dropped by as much as 80 percent.
Haugen proved that justice for the poorest people on earth was not a utopian ideal. It was a practical problem that could be solved with the right combination of legal expertise, investigative rigour, and refusal to give up.
What This Means for You
Gary Haugen saw the worst of human capacity in Rwanda and responded by building something designed to bring out the best. If you have ever witnessed injustice and felt paralysed by its scale, his story is a challenge: the size of the problem does not dictate the size of your response. Start with one case. One person. One act of advocacy. That is how movements begin.