Our Mission: Accountability Counsel amplifies the voices of communities around the world to protect their human rights and environment. As advocates for people harmed by internationally financed projects, we employ community driven and policy level strategies to access justice.
Our Approach: Our team of world-class attorneys works directly with communities challenging abuses financed from abroad. We do not litigate in courts, but instead specialize in the non-judicial accountability offices that have been created to address these abuses. Our team of policy advocates works to ensure that those accountability offices are transparent, independent, fair, accessible, and effective. We conduct research to track global complaints and expose patterns in data that can be used to prevent harm. We also convene a global network of advocates to foster a movement for accountability in international finance. Our approach employs respect-based methods to ensure that marginalized people, particularly women and girls, are included as full participants in community strategies seeking accountability.
Our Impact: In over a decade since our founding, our team has partnered with communities and advocates from 50 countries to defend their rights, demand justice, and achieve historic victories. We support communities from all over the world, and have achieved significant success and tangible impact in our cases. We have improved accountability policy at every multilateral development bank, at multiple United States agencies, and within international institutions. Our advocacy has led to the creation of several new accountability offices. Our research is, for the first time, exposing patterns in the global system of accountability that show advocates, policy-makers, financial institutions, and the accountability offices themselves best practice and where improvement is needed most.
Our Programs:
Communities
At the request of communities, our lawyers assist people to effectively use accountability offices to defend their rights and remedy harm caused by internationally financed projects. We use our expertise with these offices to add value to locally led strategies for human rights and environmental justice.
Policy Advocacy
We advocate for accountability offices that are independent, fair, transparent, professional, accessible, and effective tools for justice. Second, we identify accountability gaps and seek creation of new offices to fill them. Third, we translate the lessons from our cases into advocacy for systemic change.
Research and Accountability Resources
Our research informs the movement for accountability in international finance with in-depth research to support our community cases and policy initiatives, data and analytics to expose patterns in our field, and interactive tools to improve transparency and access to information. Together, we produce trainings and guides, and convene a global network of 140 advocates from every region that works collectively to achieve change.
