Rome — rooted in Europe’s legal history and alive with ideas for the future of justice — was the setting for this year’s PILnet Global Forum. The forum is an annual international gathering of legal and civil society leaders exploring new ways to expand access to justice. For us at iProbono, it offers an opportunity to strengthen global justice partnerships as well as a space to share resources, insights, and stories of resilience with allies from our work.
This year’s theme was “Amplifying Impact: Pro Bono & Public Interest Law in a Shifting World,” that resonates deeply with our work. I attended the forum with our CEO Mariam Faruqi and Program Coordinator Lottie Backstrom, and was struck by the extraordinary diversity in the room. There were participants from law firms, civil society, academia, and grassroots movements — discussing the need to adapt to global uncertainty while keeping justice at the centre.
I was also struck by how the conference brought together two core strands of iProbono’s mission: building global partnerships that strengthen access to justice and ensuring that vulnerable people remain at the heart of our efforts.
Throughout the proceedings, I heard practitioners and stakeholders speak at sessions on statelessness, environmental justice, and the evolving role of AI in legal systems. These conversations underscored how interconnected our struggles for justice are, and how essential it is to build networks that allow us to learn from each other. Our CEO Mariam Faruqi spoke at a panel on the Asia Pro Bono Roundtable Consortium, highlighting the shift in the region toward more collaborative, community-centred pro bono practice.
Refugee rights and inclusion were also a major theme this year, and we participated in the Global Refugee Pledge, which was aimed at building an integrated global legal community that centres the rights, experiences, and needs of refugees, stateless people, and forcibly displaced communities.
The Pledge connected to our ongoing work under the People at Risk Program. In 2021, following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, iProbono supported over 100 evacuees—ensuring they had access to safe accommodation, food, financial assistance, urgent legal advice, trauma-informed support, and pathways to long-term resettlement. You can read more about the project here.
As part of our commitment to comprehensive care for our clients, I travelled with Mariam to L’Aquila, where several Afghan families supported through our PAR program have been resettled. Sitting together in their homes, sharing the warmth of Afghan hospitality, we heard their accounts of the challenges of adapting to a new country, navigating complex bureaucracies and learning a new language. They also told us about their hard work and efforts to build their lives in Italy with dignity and hope.
This time in Italy, both at the conference and at L’Aquila, was a reminder of why we do this work. It also reminded me that justice is inseparable from care. Too often, there is a disconnect between high-level discussions on social justice and the experiences of those most affected by inequity. By centering the voices of vulnerable communities, we enrich not only our work, but the very idea of justice itself.
