About Us
Transnational Justice Initiative (TJI) is a small organisation of human rights practitioners providing legal support to people arbitrarily deprived of their liberty.
TJI’s origins lie in its co-founder’s efforts to support family members who were arbitrarily detained. During her legal studies, she brought their cases before the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD), which issued an opinion finding their detention arbitrary on all grounds advanced, ultimately securing their release. This experience demonstrated the effectiveness of international advocacy in challenging arbitrary detention and became the catalyst for the creation of the Initiative. TJI continues this work, supporting those detained in submitting cases before the UN.
Our Values
We centre the knowledge, experiences, and political agency of people deprived of their liberty. Those subjected to detention are not passive victims but active agents in struggle. Our work begins from their analysis, priorities, and strategies for resistance.
Nothing About Detention Without Those Detained
Solidarity, Not Charity
We reject charity models rooted in hierarchy and rescue. Instead, we understand that our struggles are interconnected and that liberation is collective. Change is not delivered from above, but created together; through mutual support and collective action aimed at dismantling the conditions that produce harm in the first place.
Read more about the distinction here.
Abolition Oriented
We approach all our work through an abolitionist lens. We do not seek to legitimise or improve systems of confinement. Instead, we work towards their dismantling, while using legal tools to secure immediate relief and expose their violence.
Read more about abolition here.
Our Approach
Non-Hierarchical & Consensus-Based
TJI is a non-hierarchical, consensus-based initiative made up of interconnected Teams, each with equal standing. We also establish ad hoc sub-teams as needed to respond to specific forms of detention or emerging issues.
Experience-Led
We are a diverse team, with a radical majority made up of migratised people, queer people, and People of Colour. Our varied perspectives shape our work, particularly in how we approach language, narrative, and the development of our litigation strategies.
Co-Creation, Not Representation
We adopt a community-focused approach to our litigation work. As part of our ongoing effort to grow and learn in this practice, we participate in Systemic Justice’s Community of Practice.
Read more about community-driven litigation here.
Community Accountability
We are committed to addressing any inter-personal conflict or harm within our organisation through the principles of community accountability and transformative justice.
Read more about community accountability here.
Language as Power
We understand language as a site of power. We challenge dominant narratives that portray detained people as dangerous, disposable, or voiceless.
Read more about the approach to language we adhere to here.
Language as Power
Anti-Oppression & Intersectional Approach
We work to challenge not only the legality of individual deprivations of liberty, but the systems that produce and sustain them. Our approach situates each case within broader structural oppression, recognising that detention functions as a mechanism for managing inequality and maintaining existing power relations.
Non-Reformist Reform
All our strategic orientations are grounded in the framework of non-reformist reform. We use it to make sure our case-work minimises the risk of legitimising and expanding the reach of carceral systems, while maximising the tangible impact that it has for detainees, in e.g. securing their release from detention or improving their material conditions.
Read more about the framework here.
A note on our name & visual identity
TJI’s visual identity centres on the motif of the letter. Our logo, the paper bird, is a symbol of the practice of fugitivity and 'smuggling freedom'* within confinement. It honours the long tradition of detainee literature and writing, which has been sustained despite persistent efforts by the state to suppress it. It also reflects our rejection of narratives that conceptualise detained people as passive or defeated, and of carceral systems as all-powerful. Instead, we seek to advance those that foreground the subversive force of detainees’ struggles as an emancipatory politics-in-the-making — one that creates and reveals the permeability of carceral walls and the fragility of carceral systems.
The word Transnational in our name emphasises our rejection of borders and our commitment to a world free of borders of all kinds.
The word Justice in our name reflects the central tension that animates our work. Justice is the site on which the struggle in and against the system is anchored. It captures an ongoing tug-of-war: between justice as articulated by those confronting oppression and justice as administered by the very structures of power those struggles seek to dismantle.
Our work operates within this contradiction. It mobilises the international human rights framework, which since its conception has functioned as a tool in the maintenance and expansion of global systems of domination. We approach our work from the starting point that the framework itself is not the answer to liberation. However, when used strategically, it can still produce concrete material effects, including securing an individual’s liberty and exposing the violence of the systems within which it operates. Thus, we situate our practice within the framework of non-reformist reform: using legal mechanisms strategically to secure immediate protections and decarceration while refusing to legitimise or entrench the systems of violence they confront.
To learn more, see our reading list.
*A term invoked by Basil Farraj, see, e.g., Basil Farraj, "Palestinian Prisoners: Smuggling Freedom, Writing from Captivity" (2023) CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 25.1, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol25/iss1/2.