The International Justice Clinic, launched in August 2008, draws upon UCLA's interdisciplinary strengths.  Deploying cutting-edge advocacy techniques, the Clinic involves UCLA students and faculty in developing and implementing advocacy strategies to draw attention to mass crimes, assist in the prosecution of their perpetrators, and provide expert analysis and policy recommendations for the improvement of international justice mechanisms.



​The work of the Clinic focuses on legal research, reporting and documentation.  Over the course of three years of Clinical work, faculty and students – collaborating with international organizations and NGOs – have, among other things, examined the effective functioning and legacy of post-conflict justice mechanisms in Bosnia; made recommendations for U.S. policy toward the International Criminal Court Review Conference in Kampala in 2010; assisted Cambodian victims in their goal of participation in the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Phnom Penh; contributed research to a cutting-edge project of the Open Society Justice Initiative to encourage the prosecution of pillage as a war crime in the context of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and reported on the protection of witnesses in sexual violence cases that amount to international crimes, from Colombia to Sierra Leone and Liberia to The Hague.  Major reports include the following:
Clinic Study on the Protection of Victims and Witnesses in international criminal cases concerning sexual violence
During the 2010-11 academic year, the Clinic engaged in a special collaboration with the NGO AIDS-Free World, exploring the standards, practices and challenges to protecting witnesses in sexual violence cases in armed conflict or post-conflict justice.  Students conducted research in The Hague, interviewing officials of the ICTY, ICC and Special Court for Sierra Leone; and Bogota, Freetown and Monrovia, interviewing government, international organization and NGO officials.  The resulting study, Safety Denied: Victim and Witness Protection in Sexual Violence Cases, was presented at a special conference in Kenya and may be found here​.
 
Clinic Report on Khmer Rouge Tribunal
Throughout the 2009-10 academic year, students in the International Justice Clinic worked with members of the Cambodian-American community to document the stories of survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide.  The Clinic, working with Dr. Leakhena Nou and the Applied Social Research Institute of Cambodia (ASRIC), helped victims who now live in the United States to document their stories for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the hybrid court of the United Nations and the Cambodian government colloquially known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.  Clinic participants traveled to Phnom Penh, where the ECCC is located, to deliver nearly two hundred so-called victim information forms created by the Court. 

The Clinic report, Victim Participation and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia: Involvement of the Cambodian-American Diaspora Community, is available here.  In addition to describing the work of the Clinic and the efforts of the ECCC to integrate victims into the process of accountability for Khmer Rouge crimes, the report makes a number of observations and recommendations. 
 
Report on the International Criminal Court Review Conference
The International Justice Clinic at UCLA School of Law released The Road to Kampala: U.S. Participation in the Review Conference of the International Criminal Court.  The Road to Kampala outlines key issues at stake in the upcoming ICC conference, the most significant diplomatic conference on international justice since the conclusion of the Rome Statute in 1998.  The report makes substantive recommendations for the Obama Administration's participation in a conference that will touch on major issues, such as the crime of aggression, the Court's ability to enforce arrest warrants, State cooperation with the Court, and the interplay of national legal systems with the Court's jurisdiction. The full report is available to download here.  A one-page Executive Summary may be found  here. Students in UCLA Law's International Justice Clinic researched and wrote the report, drawing not only on research at UCLA but also participation in a preparatory meeting of the ICC States Parties in The Hague in November 2009.
​